AI Features for Users of the Buyer's Guide
RP Photonics offers several AI-based features on its website – partly for users (explained here), partly for advertisers.
Structured Purchasing Process
Buying photonics products usually means spending substantial amounts of money, which implies responsibility. We warmly recommend using a structured purchasing process: to make sure that you consider all relevant aspects, and to properly document how you got to your decision.
We now actively support such a structured approach on all the pages with suppliers for our 760 product categories. For example, see the page for buying laser diodes. The key points are:
- Learn enough about the technology, as this key for understanding the requirements. We offer comprehensive high-quality learning resources for that – for free!
- Define your requirements. You need to work out a list of specifications. We support this by giving you a list of important aspects to consider – specifically for each of the 760 product categories – and with an AI-based assistant for refining this further!
- Find suppliers. You can select suppliers from our huge database, and our tool helps you to systematically check them against all your specifications.
AI-based Product Search
When searching suppliers for some items in our Buyer's Guide, the first step is usually to identify a suitable product category in order to get the list of suppliers for that.
It is not always obvious which category to choose, but with our new AI-based semantic search feature, we now make it substantially easier for you. In addition, you get search results based on product descriptions of our advertisers.
To use this feature, simply click on the search field “Product keyword”, e.g. on this page or many other Buyer's Guide Pages.
By the way, we also offer a great semantic full-text search feature in the Encyclopedia.
Remarks on the Reliability of Claims
You can use various AI-based features of the RP Photonics website (find them described below), or alternatively use general-purpose AI tools like ChatGPT or Perplexity. What's the difference?
Tools like ChatGPT are based on a huge amount of training data, much of which are of questionable origin. For example, they presumably use many forum postings which are not scientifically sound. And often they misrepresent originally correct information.
Often, you don't get the sources behind certain claims. You then have no chance to check whether the claims are correct. Even if a source is given, and this is known to be trustworthy (for example, RP Photonics), you cannot be sure that the derived conclusion is consistent with the source!
In contrast, AI-based features on the RP Photonics website specifically work with information from our own resources. For example, the semantic search tool of the Encyclopedia returns only results of that resource (or related resources, also from our website). That's trusted authoritative content.
In conclusion: If you need reliable results, search on the RP Photonics website! If an external AI bot claims things based on RP Photonics, check whether our resource really supports the claims.
Generally, never simply trust some information found somewhere in the Internet or through an AI agent. You should either be able to judge yourself (based on sufficient competences) or make sure you are using a trustworthy source, or ideally both.