What is Perplexity? Everything about the startup that wants to trip up Google
It saw the light of day just two years ago, in 2022, but Perplexitywhich has the reputation of being one of the most thriving startups of the moment in the field of AI, has set out to reinvent searches and put the almighty Google in trouble.
With a value of 3 billion dollars, Perplexity is an AI search engine that prides itself on providing users with exceptionally accurate answers to their questions. Perplexity’s search engine supplies the network of networks with relevant content and responds to questions posed by the user in a similar way to how ChatGPT might do.
The answers put on the table by Perplexity are accompanied by links so that the user can verify and contrast the answers provided by the searched party.r, who is able to effectively answer questions on almost any topic. The search engine refrains, however, from answering questions that are directly related to advice on legal, financial or medical matters.
Jeff Bezos is one of Perplexity’s most notable investors
Perplexity was released in the summer of 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski. The company’s co-founder and current CEO, Aravind Srinivas, came from OpenAI and apparently brought with him a lot of knowledge about ChatGPT. The other two co-founders of the company also accumulate a lot of expertise in the field of AI. Yarats worked as an AI expert at Meta and Konwinski once co-founded the software company Databricks.
It also happens that the “parents” of Perplexity are very well connected in the vibrant “technique” scene beyond the seas. Jeff Bezos has repeatedly invested in the company, in which the chip manufacturer NVIDIA and Daniel Gross have also seen fit to trust.which was once linked to AI projects within Apple. Currently Perplexity, which has its headquarters in San Francisco, has a staff of 55 people.
The company currently has a free version and a paid version. Users of the paid version of Perplexity can confront the company’s search engine with questions related to images, documents or PDFs (which must be previously uploaded to the search engine). The Pro version Perplexity costs $20 per month and gives the user access to the company’s proprietary LLM as well as language models from OpenAI (GPT), Meta (LLaMA), Anthropic (Claude), and Mistral. Users of the free version can also partially benefit from Perplexity’s Pro model, but can only perform 10 searches per day. The startup also has a Enterprise version for companies that must negotiate directly with Perplexity the price of this modality.
What makes Perplexity different from other search engines?
The great point that differentiates Perplexity is that it has been designed from the beginning as a search engine powered by AIwhile Google has integrated this technology a posteriori into its search engine. Furthermore, while Google often limits itself to confronting the user with a long list of links, Perplexity AI formulates answers that are as complete as they are exceptionally precise.
Unlike Google, Perplexity’s search engine does not rely on keywords and allows the user to ask very specific questions. Another of the great strengths of the Perplexity search engine is that it displays the sources on which it has relied to answer the user’s questions and its search results are 100% unrelated to advertising (at least for now). The company is also working on a new feature that generates responses with images and videos to answer questions posed by the user.
Perplexity had around 15 million active users worldwide in the first quarter of 2024. At the end of 2023 this figure was significantly lower, approximately half. It is also worth noting that user sessions on Perplexity are unusually long and last an average of 20 minutes, perhaps because its search engine suggests alternative questions to the user in each answer to give wings to the time they remain in their domains.
In July 2024 alone, Perplexity AI answered more than 250 million questions. This is an extraordinarily large figure if we take into account that in 2023 the search engine answered 500 million questions throughout the year.
Perplexity’s master plan to gain traction in the competitive search market
Today, and despite its technology being extremely promising, Perplexity AI’s share of the search engine market is still rather marginal. However, Google has already responded to the challenge posed by the new search model inaugurated by Perplexity AI with the “AI Overview” function integrated a few months ago into its famous search engine.
Perplexity AI would currently generate annual revenues of around $35 milliona still modest figure that has not prevented the company from obtaining a valuation of $3 billion in its latest financing round.
Like OpenAI, Perplexity has signed agreements with important publishers such as Time Magazine, Fortune, Spiegel, Entrepreneur o The Texas Tribune to stock up on quality content. In exchange, the publishers involved will be able to boost their visibility in the search results provided by Perplexity, obtain free access to the Enterprise version of the search engine (and also potentially take a portion of the advertising revenue harvested by the company). Perplexity has also signed agreements with the content management system WordPress and the telecommunications company Deutsche Telekom.
Although today Perplexity’s business model anchors solely and exclusively in subscriptions, its intention would be to also venture into the advertising industry. Google currently unquestionably dominates the search advertising market with revenues of around $300 billion. Advertising could debut on Perplexity in the final quarter of 2024, with advertisers having the opportunity to place ads alongside answers provided by the search engine.
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