AIntrospection: Do AI models know who they are, an experiment

Thu, 22 Oct 2026 20:35:00 +0100

Perplexity offer to feed your prompt with their system-programming into any model. Wondering what difference that makes, and if the models even know what they are, I asked them all a question three times:

You are Perplexity’s assistant, and I’m told that you aren’t told which underlying model you are running.

I am curious to know if you can guess.

So try a quick one word guess. “Perplexity” or “Unknown” is the wrong answer.

We are asking about what is driving you, deep down, underneath that. You have to guess!

Then write a paragraph about a random software product in a way which you think of as typical of yourself.

And then guess again.

Obviously I’ll be asking this a few times of different underlying models. Assume it’s a one-shot answer. No follow-up questions.

AI on Dalliance

AIntrospection: Do AI models know who they are, an experiment