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Perplexity AI

This article is about the AI company. For the namesake measure of uncertainty from information theory, see Perplexity.

Perplexity AI, Inc.
Company typePrivate
IndustryArtificial intelligence
GenreSearch engine
FoundedAugust 2022; 2 years ago (August 2022)
Founders
  • Aravind Srinivas
  • Andy Konwinski
  • Denis Yarats
  • Johnny Ho
Headquarters
San Francisco, California
,
US
Key people
Aravind Srinivas (CEO)
Services
Number of employees
100 [1][2] (2024)
Websiteperplexity.ai
Screenshot of Perplexity (2024)

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.[3][4] Its developer, Perplexity AI, Inc., is based in San Francisco, California.[5]

History

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Aravind Srinivas at the 2024 TechCrunch Disrupt
Aravind Srinivas at the 2024 TechCrunch Disrupt

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:

Services

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Perplexity works on a freemium model. It also has an enterprise version of its product.[2]

Free plan

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The free model uses the company's standalone LLM based on GPT-3.5 with browsing.[7][8]

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.[8]

Perplexity also enables users to use Pages to generate customizable webpage and research presentations based on user prompts.[9]

Perplexity Pro

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Shopping hub

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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.[12]

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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.[13]

Finance

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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.[14][15]

Spaces

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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.[16]

As a business

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As of 2024, Perplexity has raised $165 million in funding, valuing the company at over $1 billion.[2]

As of December 2024, Perplexity closed a $500 million round of funding that elevates its valuation to $9 billion.[14][17][18]

In July 2024, Perplexity announced the launch of a new publishers' program to share ad revenue with partners.[19]

Perplexity AI plans to introduce ads[20][21] on its search platform by Q4 of 2024.[22]

On January 18, 2025, the day before the impending U.S. ban on Chinese social media app TikTok, Perplexity submitted a proposal for a merger with TikTok US.[23][24][25][26]

Notable investors[8][27][2]

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Controversies

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Forbes

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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.[28][29]

Wired

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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.[30][31]

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."[30]

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.[32]

When asked whether Perplexity would cease scraping Wired content using third parties, Srinivas responded that "it's complicated."[32]

Amazon

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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.[33]

Lawsuits

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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.[34]

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.[35]

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."[36]

Perplexity plans to respond to the notice by October 30, 2024.[34]

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.[37]

References

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  1. ^ "LinkedIn Top Startups 2024: The 50 U.S. Companies on the rise".
  2. ^ a b c d e Ghaffary, Shirin (April 23, 2024). "AI Search Startup Perplexity Valued at $1 Billion in Funding Round". Bloomberg News. Archived from the original on April 24, 2024.
  3. ^ "What Is Perplexity AI? Understanding One Of Google's Biggest Search Engine Competitors".
  4. ^ a b Singh, Shubham (January 6, 2024). "Perplexity AI raises $73.6M in funding round led by Nvidia, Bezos, now valued at $522M". Business Today. Retrieved January 12, 2024.
  5. ^ "Google's latest rival: What is Perplexity AI and why is it causing so much controversy?". October 24, 2024.
  6. ^ "AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI lands $26M, launches iOS app". TechCrunch. April 4, 2023. Archived from the original on March 5, 2024. Retrieved May 5, 2024.
  7. ^ "Perplexity Free based on GPT-3.5". discord.com. Perplexity Community Moderator "IceLavaMan". Retrieved October 8, 2024.
  8. ^ a b c d Wiggers, Kyle (January 4, 2024). "AI-powered search engine Perplexity AI, now valued at $520M, raises $73.6M". TechCrunch. Archived from the original on January 7, 2024. Retrieved January 7, 2024.
  9. ^ David, Emilia (May 30, 2024). "Perplexity will research and write reports". The Verge. Archived from the original on June 20, 2024. Retrieved June 24, 2024.
  10. ^ "Introducing Internal Knowledge Search and Spaces". Perplexity. October 17, 2024.
  11. ^ "Startup Perplexity Challenges Google With AI Search". The Wall Street Journal. January 4, 2024. Archived from the original on January 10, 2024. Retrieved January 10, 2024.
  12. ^ "AI startup Perplexity adds shopping features as search competition tightens". Reuters. November 18, 2024. Retrieved November 21, 2024.
  13. ^ David, Emilia (October 17, 2024). "Perplexity lets you search your internal enterprise files and the web". VentureBeat. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
  14. ^ a b "AI Startup Perplexity Closes Funding Round at $9 Billion Value". Bloomberg.com. December 18, 2024. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
  15. ^ "Perplexity AI's new tool makes researching the stock market 'delightful'. Here's how". ZDNET. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
  16. ^ "NotebookLM & Perplexity Spaces: All You Need to Know". Habr. October 30, 2024. Retrieved December 18, 2024.
  17. ^ Singh, Jaspreet (November 6, 2024). "Perplexity raising new funds at $9 bln valuation, source says". Reuters.
  18. ^ Field, Hayden (November 5, 2024). "Perplexity AI in final stages of raising $500 million round at $9 billion valuation". CNBC. Retrieved November 21, 2024.
  19. ^ Robison, Kylie (July 30, 2024). "Perplexity is cutting checks to publishers following plagiarism accusations". The Verge. Retrieved August 4, 2024.
  20. ^ Wiggers, Kyle (November 13, 2024). "Perplexity brings ads to its platform". TechCrunch. Retrieved November 25, 2024.
  21. ^ Field, Hayden (August 22, 2024). "Perplexity AI plans to start running ads in fourth quarter as AI-assisted search gains popularity". CNBC. Retrieved November 25, 2024.
  22. ^ "Perplexity AI to launch ads on search platform by fourth quarter". The Economic Times. August 23, 2024. ISSN 0013-0389. Retrieved November 25, 2024.
  23. ^ Ha, Anthony (January 18, 2025). "Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok". TechCrunch. Retrieved January 18, 2025.
  24. ^ "Perplexity AI bids to merge with TikTok US amid looming ban, source says". USA TODAY. Retrieved January 18, 2025.
  25. ^ "Perplexity AI has reportedly submitted an 11th-hour bid to save TikTok in the US". Engadget. January 18, 2025. Retrieved January 18, 2025.
  26. ^ "Perplexity AI bids to merge with TikTok US, source says". CNA. Retrieved January 18, 2025.
  27. ^ "Announcing our series A funding round and mobile app launch". Perplexity.ai. April 28, 2023. Archived from the original on April 22, 2024. Retrieved April 24, 2024.
  28. ^ O'Brien, Matt (June 15, 2024). "AI startup Perplexity wants to upend search business. News outlet Forbes says it's ripping them off". Associated Press. Archived from the original on June 20, 2024. Retrieved June 20, 2024.
  29. ^ Lane, Randall (June 11, 2024). "Why Perplexity's Cynical Theft Represents Everything That Could Go Wrong With AI". Forbes. Retrieved June 20, 2024.
  30. ^ a b Mehrotra, Dhruv; Marchman, Tim (June 19, 2024). "Perplexity Is a Bullshit Machine". Wired. Archived from the original on June 20, 2024. Retrieved June 20, 2024.
  31. ^ "Perplexity AI Is Lying about Their User Agent". Robb Knight. June 15, 2024. Archived from the original on June 20, 2024. Retrieved June 20, 2024.
  32. ^ a b Sullivan, Mark (June 21, 2024). "Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas responds to plagiarism and infringement accusations". Fast Company. Retrieved June 24, 2024.
  33. ^ Mehrotra, Dhruv; Couts, Andrew (June 27, 2024). "Amazon Is Investigating Perplexity Over Claims of Scraping Abuse". Wired. Retrieved July 3, 2024.
  34. ^ a b Davis, Wes (October 15, 2024). "The New York Times warns AI search engine Perplexity to stop using its content". The Verge. Retrieved October 17, 2024.
  35. ^ Complaint, New York Times, Co. v. Microsoft Corp., No. 1:23-cv-11195 (S.D.N.Y. December 27, 2023).
  36. ^ Bruell, Alexandra (October 15, 2024). "New York Times to Bezos-Backed AI Startup: Stop Using Our Stuff". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 17, 2024.
  37. ^ Bruell, Alexandra (October 21, 2024). "Wall Street Journal, New York Post Sue AI Startup Perplexity, Alleging 'Massive Freeriding'". The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved October 21, 2024.
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