Perplexity AI

Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine that uses large language models (LLMs) to answer queries using sources from the web and cites links within the text response. Its developer, Perplexity AI, Inc., is based in San Francisco, California.

History

Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho, engineers with backgrounds in back-end systems, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning:
* Srinivas, the CEO, worked at OpenAI as an AI researcher.
* Konwinski was among the founding team at Databricks.
* Yarats, the CTO, was an AI research scientist at Meta.
* Ho, the CSO, worked as an engineer at Quora, then as a quantitative trader on Wall Street.

Services

Perplexity works on a freemium model. It also has an enterprise version of its product.

Free plan

The free model uses the company's standalone LLM based on GPT-3.5 with browsing.

It uses the context of the user queries to provide a personalized search result. Perplexity summarizes the search results and produces a text with inline citations.

Perplexity also enables users to use Pages to generate customizable webpage and research presentations based on user prompts.

Perplexity Pro

* Provides access to an API
* Search both internal files and web content
* Asks the user clarifying questions to refine queries
* Enables users to upload and analyze local files, including images
* Has access to GPT-4, Claude 3.5, Grok-2, Llama 3 and in-house Perplexity LLMs
* Able to generate images using AI via Playground v3, DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and FLUX 1

Shopping hub

On 18 November 2024, Perplexity launched its shopping hub to attract users, backed by Amazon and leading AI chipmaker Nvidia. This will give users product cards which will show relevant items in response to asked questions about shopping.

Internal Knowledge Search

Internal Knowledge Search enables Pro and Enterprise Pro users to search across web content and internal documents simultaneously. Users can upload and search through Excel, Word, PDF, and other common file formats. Enterprise Pro users have a limit of 500 files for upload and indexing.

Finance

In October 2024, introduced new finance-related features, including looking up stock prices and company earnings data. The tool provides real-time stock quotes and price tracking, industry peer comparisons and basic financial analysis tools. The platform sources its financial data from Financial Modeling Prep (FMP) to ensure accuracy.

Spaces

Perplexity Spaces was released in October 2024 as an AI-powered collaboration hub. The platform allows users to create customized knowledge spaces that combine web searches with personal file integration. Users can upload up to 50 different documents, with a 25MB size limit per file.

As a business

As of 2024, Perplexity has raised $165 million in funding, valuing the company at over $1 billion.

As of December 2024, Perplexity closed a $500 million round of funding that elevates its valuation to $9 billion.

In July 2024, Perplexity announced the launch of a new publishers' program to share ad revenue with partners.

Perplexity AI plans to introduce ads on its search platform by Q4 of 2024.

Notable investors

# Jeff Bezos
# Nvidia
# Databricks
# Bessemer Venture Partners
# Susan Wojcicki
# Jeff Dean
# Yann LeCun
# Andrej Karpathy
# Nat Friedman
# Garry Tan

Controversies

Forbes

In June 2024, ''Forbes'' publicly criticized Perplexity for use of their content.

According to ''Forbes'', Perplexity published a story which was largely copied from a proprietary ''Forbes'' article, without mentioning or prominently citing ''Forbes''.

In response, Srinivas said that the feature had some "rough edges" and accepted feedback, but maintained that Perplexity only "aggregates" rather than plagiarizes information.

Wired

In June 2024, separate investigations by the magazine ''Wired'' and web developer Robb Knight found that Perplexity does not respect the robots.txt standard, which allows websites to stop web crawlers from scraping content, reportedly despite Perplexity claiming the opposite.

Perplexity also lists the IP address ranges and user agent strings of their web crawlers publicly, but according to ''Wired'' and Robb Knight, they use undisclosed IP addresses and spoofed user agent strings when ignoring robots.txt.

''Wired'' also stated that, in some cases, Perplexity may be summarizing:

"not actual news articles but reconstructions of what they say based on URLs and traces of them left in search engines like extracts and metadata, offering summaries purporting to be based on direct access to the relevant text."

In response, Srinivas stated in a phone interview that:

"Perplexity is not ignoring the Robot Exclusions Protocol... We don't just rely on our own web crawlers, we rely on third-party web crawlers as well."

Srinivas explained that the web crawler identified by ''Wired'' was owned by a third-party provider.

When asked whether Perplexity would cease scraping ''Wired'' content using third parties, Srinivas responded that "it's complicated."

Amazon

Amazon Web Services, which hosts the Perplexity crawler, has a terms of service clause prohibiting its users from ignoring the robots.txt standard.

Amazon began a "routine" investigation into the company's usage of Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud.

Lawsuits

In October 2024, ''The New York Times'' (NYT) sent a cease-and-desist notice to Perplexity to stop accessing and using NYT content, claiming that Perplexity is violating its copyright by scraping data from its website.

NYT is also suing OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement for similarly using millions of its articles to train the large language models that power ChatGPT.

The cease-and-desist notice sent by NYT lawyers read in part:

"Perplexity and its business partners have been unjustly enriched by using, without authorization, The Times's expressive, carefully written and researched, and edited journalism without a license."

Perplexity plans to respond to the notice by October 30, 2024.

The same month, Dow Jones and ''New York Post'' filed a lawsuit against Perplexity, alleging copyright infringement. The lawsuit also alleges that Perplexity attributed quotes to an article on F-16 jets for Ukraine that never appeared in the original article.

References

External links

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{{Web search engines

Artificial intelligence companies
Chatbots
Virtual assistants
2022 software
Software companies established in 2022