Perplexity

Perplexity AI is a company developing an artificial intelligence (AI)-based search engine platform. Founded in August 2022, the company's flagship product is a search engine that delivers answers to complex questions using large language models (LLMs). Perplexity summarizes search results to provide users with an answer to their query rather than returning a list of links. The information returned comes with citations, allowing users to determine the reliability of the information. The search engine also incorporates follow-up questions so users can search the web in a conversational manner. Perplexity is available as a desktop app, iPhone app, and Android app.

Perplexity also offers Perplexity Copilot—a digital assistant with added features for in-depth answers. Copilot fine-tunes searches by asking the user clarifying questions. Once it understands the user's aim, it returns a succinct answer based on a range of sources.

Promotional video for Perplexity AI

Perplexity was originally powered by existing AI models, including OpenAI's GPT-4 and Anthropic's Claude 2. In November 2023, Perplexity released two new "PPLX" models—pplx-7b-online and pplx-70b-online. These models are fine-tuned and augmented versions of the open-source mistral-7b and llama2-70b models from Mistral and Meta. Perplexity offers a "Pro" paid version of its technology at $20 a month. Subscribers to Perplexity’s Pro plan can switch between models, including Google’s Gemini, Mistra 7Bl, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, and OpenAI’s GPT-4, and unlock additional features, such as image generation and unlimited use of Perplexity’s Copilot.

As of January 2024, Perplexity has raised over $100 million in funding and grown to 10 million monthly active users, with over a million people installing the company's mobile apps on iOS and Android. Following Perplexity's Series B funding round, the company was valued at $520 million. Reports at the time of the funding state the company's annual recurring revenue is between $5 million and $10 million.

Perplexity AI was founded on August 3, 2022, by Aravind Srinivas (CEO), Denis Yarats (CTO), and Andy Konwinski. Srinivas previously worked on language and diffusion generative models at OpenAI, Yarats had been an AI research scientist at Facebook AI Research, and Konwinski is a cofounder of DataBricks. The privately held company is VC-backed, with AIX Ventures having a minority holding. In September 2022, Perplexity raised $3.1 million in seed funding led by Elad Gil and Nat Friedman, with participation from Pieter Abbeel (UC Berkeley, AIX Ventures), Yann LeCun (Chief Scientist, Meta), Andrej Karpathy (Founding Member, OpenAI), Ashish Vaswani (Lead Inventor of Transformer), Amjad Masad (CEO, Replit), Clem Delangue (CEO, HuggingFace) and others.

On December 7, 2022, the company announced its Perplexity Ask product; eight days later, Perplexity introduced Bird SQL, a Twitter search interface powered by Perplexity's search engine. The release was a demo, not a commercial product. In January 2023, the company announced a major update to Perplexity Ask, providing answers with up-to-date sources and allowing users to ask follow-up questions to create a conversational-style search engine. On February 1, 2023, Perplexity released a Chrome extension for Perplexity Ask. On February 8, 2023, the company rebranded its flagship search engine product to "Perplexity."

On March 28, 2023, Perplexity stated it had reached 2 million monthly active users in the four months since launch. The company also announced it had raised $25.6 million in series A funding. The round was led by Peter Sonsini of New Enterprise Associates (Board member, Databricks) with participation from seed round investors Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Bob Muglia, as well as new investors Susan Wojcicki (Former CEO of Youtube), Paul Buchheit (Creator of Gmail), Soleio (Designer of Messenger, Dropbox), and Databricks Ventures.

On January 4, 2024, Perplexity announced $73.6 million in series B funding. The round was led by IVP with continued participation from seed and series A investors NEA, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, and Databricks, as well as new investors NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions Fund), Tobi Lutke, Bessemer Venture Partners, Naval Ravikant, Balaji Srinivasan, Guillermo Rauch, Austen Allred, Factorial Funds, and Kindred Ventures, among others. The funding gives the company a valuation of around $520 million. Upon the announcement of its series B round, Perplexity announced it has 10 million monthy active users and that its mobile app has been installed over a million times (including both Android and iOS).

Perplexity is an answer engine that uses large language models to provide answers to complex questions. Instead of displaying a list of links, Perplexity summarizes search results with citations to help users verify the accuracy of the information provided.

Comparison of Perplexity and Google outputs for a given query.

Perplexity allows users to ask follow-up questions and search using a conversational approach. Each follow-up question creates a new search query. The accuracy of the Perplexity's results is limited by search results and AI capabilities. Therefore, the answers it provides are not always accurate. Perplexity can also generate offensive or dangerous content, for which the company is not liable. Perplexity asks users to not enter any personal information.

Bird SQL from Perplexity translates natural language into SQL code to answer queries related to Twitter's database. The Twitter search interface is powered by Perplexity's structured search engine. Natural language is translated into SQL code using OpenAI Codexs, allowing anyone to quickly find information on Twitter without any knowledge of SQL. Bird SQL helps users quickly find information from Twitter that would not be possible using conventional search engines.

Examples of BirdSQL outputs.

Bird SQL can also visualize and summarize results, generating aggregate stats and plots directly from natural language with embedded code.

Example of a graphical output from Bird SQL.

Bird SQL from Perplexity is a demo, not a commercial product. The results it produces are limited by the company's Twitter data (which is incomplete), its database performance, and the expressiveness of SQL.