Perplexity AI

PerplexityAI Company Profile

Perplexity AI is a company founded in 2022 with the goal of building a conversational search engine. The company was founded by Andy Konwinski, the founder of Databricks.

PerplexityAI launched its own search product perplexity.ai in January 2023. This tool is positioned as a conversational search engine. By using OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 to extract search results, and then generate answers to user questions. Over time, perplexity.ai has also integrated more and more powerful large language models, including GPT-4, Claude-2.1, etc.

Large model pplx-70B-online released by PerplexityAI

Perplexity AI is positioned as a conversational search engine. The products it provides are mainly based on network retrieval to generate user answers, so it emphasizes the real-time and wide range of services. In the early days, PerplexityAI used GPT-4 and Claude-2.1 to provide services. In early December 2023, PerplexityAI released two large models, namely pplx-70B-online with 70 billion parameters and pplx-7b-online with 7 billion parameters. They emphasize that both large models are designed for retrieval. Therefore, there is fast online retrieval and the ability to generate answers based on dynamic data. In addition, when answering, it will also pass multi-party reference verification to provide more authentic answers. These two models have been integrated into the perplexity.ai service.

Introduction to PerplexityAI business model and products (perplexity.ai)

PerplexityAI's product is a conversational search engine, perplexity.ai. perplexity.ai's product was first a web version, and later launched a client version. All offer free products. In terms of search scope, in order to provide more accurate results, perplexity.ai’s search scope supports several different customizations:

Whole-network search: Search the entire Internet without limiting the scope;

Academic retrieval: focuses on the search of academic publication results, and can retrieve the latest paper results. Since the results come from academic publications, they are highly professional and credible;

Wolfram Alpha: Integrated search with the WolframAlpha intelligence engine. WlframAlpha is a powerful calculation tool that can provide analysis and deduction for data and mathematical formulas.

YouTube: You can search for videos in YouTube and match appropriate video results based on your search content;

Reddit: A discussion community covering a wide variety of topics. Similar to Baidu Tieba, users can freely create topics and discuss them. There is a huge amount of data and information of all kinds.

As shown below:

Perplexity provides search results to the large model by accessing the large model, allowing the large model to answer the content. Due to its excellent search capabilities and free resources, it has attracted a lot of users.

Currently, the basic functions of Perplexity are free, involving the content of large models (Copilot search), and 5 searches are performed every four hours. The Pro version provides at least 300 searches per day. The Pro version is available as a monthly subscription for $20. Compared with the free version, the additional features of the Prob version are as follows:

Provides more than 300 Copilot conversations every day (GPT-4 is 40 messages in three hours, which is 320 conversations in one day);

Provides multi-modal capabilities based on Claude-2.1 and GPT-4. It is worth mentioning that Claude-2.1's PDF document analysis should be very powerful at present. It is very good to have both GPT-4 and Claude-2.1 options for $20. You can also generate pictures and analyze pictures.

Model selection: The free version cannot select a model and can only use the default Perplexity's own model, while Pro subscribers can manually select powerful models, including GPT-4, Claude-2.1, Gemini, etc.

$5 monthly interface: Perplexity officially provides a $5 pplx-api interface quota.

One benefit of perplexity.ai is that you can pay with a visa card issued by a mainland bank.

perplexity.ai’s services are free to use, registration address: https://perplexity.ai/pro?referral_code=DRPZ9HUQ