perplexity ai?

Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine marketed as an “answer engine” that answers queries using natural language predictive text. Launched in 2022, Perplexity generates answers using the sources from the web and cites links within the text response. Perplexity works on freemium model, the free product uses its Perplexity model based on OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 model combined with the company’s standalone Large language model (LLM) that incorporates natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, while the paid version Perplexity Pro has access to GPT-4, Claude 3, Mistral Large, and an Experimental Perplexity Model.

History

Perplexity was founded in August 2022 by Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Aravind Srinivas. Srinivas previously worked at OpenAI and now serves as Perplexity’s CEO. In December 2022, Perplexity released Bird SQL which is used to search information on Twitter.

As of 2024, Perplexity has raised $100 million in funding, valuing the company at $520 million. Additional investors include Nvidia, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy and others. It has garnered about 10 million monthly users.

The main product of the Perplexity AI is its search engine, which relies on natural language processing. It interprets the context of the user queries in order to provide more personalized search results. Perplexity summarizes the search results and gives a text with inline citations. It prioritizes newer sources to avoid outdated information. The user can ask follow-up questions and Perplexity will interpret them in the context of the user’s previous queries. The conversation between the user and Perplexity can be saved in the library. It is available for download on IOS and Android.

Perplexity provides different modes of searching. The “Pro” mode asks the user clarifying questions to refine queries. The “Focus” mode sets a topic for queries. The “Writing” mode generates results without doing the web search.

The user can upload a file for analysis. Besides the text documents, it also accepts file formats like CSV.