Perplexity

Perplexity is an innovative US-based AI search engine project founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. The company is headquartered in the U.S. and has a team of engineers at its headquarters with backgrounds in back-end systems, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The project officially launched its main search engine on December 7, 2022, and has since released a Google Chrome extension as well as iOS and Android apps.

Core Functionality and Features

Perplexity is described as an “Answer Engine” that combines a large-scale language model (LLM) with real-time web search capabilities to process user queries and synthesize responses that provide instant answers based on current internet content, with inline source citations. This differs from traditional search engines (e.g., Google) in that it focuses on conversational interaction and precision, avoiding extraneous links and endless tabs. Its responses are transparent and efficient for news, score queries, or in-depth information searches, helping users quickly bridge intent and answers.

• Free vs. Pro Subscription: The free public version provides basic functionality, while a paid Pro subscription unlocks a more advanced language model, additional features, and higher usage limits.
• Real-time Collaboration and Spaces: Support for “Spaces” allows teams to invite members to collaborate and share projects for increased productivity.
• Deep Research Mode: Deep Research (now known as Research) accomplishes hours of in-depth research by human experts in 2-4 minutes, with dozens of searches, reading of hundreds of sources, and reasoning to generate comprehensive reports. It is suitable for use in finance, marketing, and technology, and can also be used as a personal advisor for health, product research, or travel planning.

Latest Developments

• Perplexity Labs: A productivity tool designed for complex projects that generates full reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and simple web apps based on natural language prompts in 10 minutes or more, and integrates research, data analysis, and web development. pro subscribers are available on the web, iOS, and Android.
• Perplexity Pages: Used to turn research into visual content, such as in-depth articles, reports, or guides, to support rapid knowledge sharing among researchers and enthusiasts.
• Company valuation: As of July 2025, Perplexity is valued at $18 billion.

Controversies and Challenges

Perplexity has faced allegations of copyright infringement, including unauthorized content use and trademark issues, from media outlets such as the BBC, Dow Jones, and the New York Times. The company was accused of using a web crawler that spoofed user-agent strings to crawl content from news sites that it was prohibited from crawling.

Overall, Perplexity is reshaping the way information is discovered and is seen as the future direction of search technology, especially in terms of the convergence of AI and search. It is suitable for curiosity-driven users, researchers, and team collaboration scenarios, helping with one-stop solutions from simple queries to complex projects.

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