Perplexity launches its freemium ‘deep search’ product

Perplexity is the latest AI company that has released an in-depth research feature. The new feature was announced on Friday.

Google In December, Gemini AI released a feature similar to this on its Gemini AI platform. OpenAI then launched its own research agent in the first week of this month. Deep Research is the feature that all three companies have named.

It’s a goal to provide more detailed answers with real citations, for more professional use-cases, as opposed to what you would get from a chatbot. In Perplexity Deep Research can be accessed on the web and will soon be available in its Mac, iOS and Android apps. You can use Deep Research by selecting “Deep Research”from a dropdown menu, when you submit your query to Perplexity. The report will be created and exported as a pdf or shared as a page.

Perplexity stated that Deep Research “iteratively search, read documents, and reason about what to do, refining its plan as it learns about the subject areas” to create this report.

But while you currently need a $200-per-month Pro subscription to use OpenAI’s Deep Research (the company plans to expand to other subscription tiers), Perplexity’s Deep Research is available for free — non-subscribers get an unspecified-but-limited number of queries per day, while paying subscribers get unlimited queries.

The Perplexity Deep Research seems to be faster, with most tasks being completed in less than three minutes as opposed to the 5 to 30 minutes it takes OpenAI Deep Research.

When asked to compare It summarized the differences as follows:

• Perplexity AI excels in speed and accessibility for casual researchers
• OpenAI dominates in analytical depth for enterprise applications
• Google integrates most seamlessly with existing productivity ecosystems. It summarized these differences as follows: “
  • The Economist believes that Google integrates the most seamlessly with existing productivity eco-systems.
  • OpenAI dominates analytical depth for enterprise applications.” Recently,OpenAI’s Deep Research was criticized for its shortcomings. These are likely to apply here as well: not only limitations in its “creativity” when interpreting data, but also a tendency to rely solely on “easily accessible” sources. There is also a greater risk that “outsourcing your research to an supergenius assistant” may “reduce the opportunities to have your most innovative ideas.”