Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI is a company offering a conversational search engine platform that utilizes large language models (LLMs).

Perplexity offers a free trial of its conversational AI-powered answer engine and paid plans for businesses and organizations that require more advanced features and capabilities. Moreover, users have the option to specify search sources, including Reddit, academic papers, YouTube, and the entirety of the internet. Additionally, its Internal Knowledge Search feature enables users to upload and search through their own files, including Excel sheets, Word documents, and PDFs. In April 2024, it launched Enterprise Pro, a service tailored for business use with enhanced security and privacy features, priced at USD 40 per month.

Perplexity’s paid version is equipped with models like OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude-3, and Meta’s Llama-3. In August 2023, Perplexity added enhancements to its Copilot feature, incorporating OpenAI's GPT-3.5 Turbo, fine-tuning from OpenAI, and introducing Meta’s Code Llama to Perplexity's LLaMa Chat. With this, users gained additional capabilities, including uploading PDF files, refining search results based on specific sources, and setting up personalized AI profiles for tailored search outcomes. Further, Code LLaMA integrates Meta AI's coding LLM to enhance responses to technical questions. Users can utilize the open-source LLM to generate code functions or clarify code sections. It also offers "Pages", a feature that formulates a customizable web page based on users' requests, and a shopping feature that displays visual cards containing product details, pricing, seller information, descriptions, and pros and cons.

In November 2023, the company launched its own LLMs, pplx-7b-online and pplx-70b-online offering real-time access to updated information and a conversational chatbot style interface. The models are enhanced versions of open source offerings by Mistral and Meta.

Perplexity acquired Carbon which specializes in connecting AI systems to external data sources in December 2024, to develop enterprise search products.

Key customers and partnerships

As of April 2024, Perplexity had 10 million monthly active users (MAUs). Some of its notable enterprise customers included Copy.ai, Stripe, Zoom, Bridgewater, Snowflake, The Cleveland Cavaliers, Universal McCann, Thrive Global, Databricks, Paytm, ElevenLabs, HP, Vercel, and Replit.

In January 2024, Rabbit, an AI gadget manufacturer, announced a collaboration with Perplexity, to integrate Perplexity's technology into Rabbit's R1 device. In April 2024, the company partnered with Japan's SoftBank Corp. and Germany's Deutsche Telekom AG to extend the company’s reach by marketing Perplexity's capabilities to consumer and business customers. Perplexity has also partnered with Yelp Data (March 2024) to integrate its data directly into the Perplexity platform and provide users with comprehensive and reliable information on local businesses, particularly restaurants and cafes, ElevenLabs (February 2024) to launch a short-form podcast, "Discover Daily," which publishes content on innovation, science, and culture to its listeners, and AWS (July 2024) to launch its Enterprise Pro solution.

The company partnered with LA Times, Adweek, Mexico News Daily, and several other news publishers in December 2024 to expand its publisher program.