Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI is a research and conversational search engine powered by artificial intelligence that responds to queries using natural language predictive text. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Established in 2022, Perplexity utilizes information from online sources to provide answers and includes links in its text responses. The platform operates on a freemium model, where the basic version utilizes the company's large language model (LLM) with natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, while the premium version, Perplexity Pro, offers access to GPT-4, Claude 3.5, Mistral Large, Llama 3, and an Experimental Perplexity Model. By Q1 of 2024, Perplexity had amassed a user base of 15 million monthly users.

History

Established in 2022, Perplexity was co-founded by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, all engineers specializing in back-end systems, AI (Artificial Intelligence), and machine learning. Yarats, who serves as the CTO (Chief Technology Officer), previously worked as an AI research scientist at Meta, while Srinivas, the CEO (Chief Executive Officer), was an AI researcher at OpenAI. Ho, the Chief Strategy Officer, began his career as an engineer at Quora, then transitioned to become a quantitative trader on Wall Street. Konwinski was part of the founding team at Databricks.

By 2024, Perplexity had secured $165 million in funding, leading to a company valuation exceeding $1 billion. Notable investors in the company include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Nat Friedman, and Garry Tan.

Perplexity achieved a valuation of $3 billion in mid-2024.

Functionality

The primary offering of Perplexity is its search engine, which is based on natural language processing. By leveraging the context of user queries, it delivers customized search results. Additionally, Perplexity condenses the search outcomes and generates a text with embedded references.

The upgraded version of Perplexity, known as the "Pro" mode (previously named Copilot), prompts users with specific questions to enhance their search queries. This feature allows users to upload and analyze local files, such as images, while also creating images through AI technology. Furthermore, it grants users access to an API. In April 2024, Perplexity introduced a new enterprise edition of its product.

Perplexity introduced a new feature named Pages in May 2024. This feature creates a personalized webpage by using user inputs. Pages leverages Perplexity's AI search algorithms to collect data and produce a research report that can be shared and published with ease.