What the industry can expect from Perplexity’s AI research, which has been made crazy cheap

Perplexity shattered AI market’s current status quo by launching today Deep Researchis a tool which generates comprehensive reports in minutes, and allows users to access advanced AI capabilities at a fraction the cost of typical enterprise costs.

Thankful for open-source! We’re going make this faster and cheaper,” wrote Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity in a letter. Post on X“Knowledge must be accessible to all and useful. Not hidden behind outrageously expensive subscription plans which benefit corporations, but not the humanity!

Open source is a great thing! We’ll keep improving this to make it faster and cheaper. Knowledge should be accessible to everyone and useful. Not hidden behind outrageously expensive subscription plans which benefit corporations but are not in the interest of humanity! https://t.co/mtG4oZhl4z pic.twitter.com/M1yHtXJKUe

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) February 14, 2025 (19659010)

Perplexity Deep Research redefines AI pricing – can enterprise AI survive this?

This launch reveals a painful truth about AI pricing: Enterprise subscriptions can be unnecessary. While Anthropic Openai charges thousands of dollars per month for their services. Perplexity gives five free queries to all users every day. Pro subscribers pay $20 per month for 500 daily queries, faster processing and faster response times. This price could force larger AI firms to explain why they charge up to 100x more.

Enterprise AI spending has increased significantly, as have AI investments by companies. The overall IT budget is expected to increase by less than 2%, but 5.7% in 2025. Some businesses plan to increase their AI expenditure by 10% or even more, with an increase of $3.4 millions on average. Perplexity, which offers similar capabilities at consumer-friendly prices, makes these investments look questionable.

Deep Research’s technical achievements may suggest that expensive AI services are overpriced, rather than superior. The system outperformed Google’s Gemini Thinking, and other leading models. It scored 93.9% accuracy in the SimpleQA benchmark, and reached 20.5% accuracy on Humanity’s last Exam.

OpenAI Deep Research is still leading with 26.6%, but OpenAI charges 200 percent more for this service. Perplexity’s ability, at consumer prices, to deliver performance close to that of enterprise-level companies raises important questions regarding the pricing structure in the AI industry.

The company announced that “Deep Research on Perplexity” can complete most tasks in less than 3 minutes. It highlights its ability to perform hundreds of searches and analyze them simultaneously. The tool combines web searching, coding abilities and reasoning functions to refine the research iteratively – mimicking expert human researcher but at machine speed.

Why Perplexity’s affordable artificial intelligence is removing barriers to advanced technology.

Its implications go beyond the price. Enterprise AI has created an artificial digital divide between the well-funded and everyone else. Small businesses, researchers, and professionals who could not afford subscriptions of a thousand dollars were effectively locked out from advanced AI capabilities.

The approach of Perplexity changes this calculation. The tool can handle complex tasks from financial analysis to market research, technical documentation to healthcare insights. Users can export their findings as PDFs, or share them via Perplexity’s platform. This could replace expensive subscriptions to research tools and specialized software.

Perplexity has made deep research a commodity pic.twitter.com/Fk8yvPTLzV

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) Deep Research plans to expand its operations to include the entire United States by February 14, 2025 (19659026). iOS, Androidand Mac platforms could help users who previously thought AI tools were out of their reach. This broad access could be more valuable than any technological breakthrough, putting advanced AI capabilities into the hands of users that need them most. This shift is important for technical decision makers. Companies that pay premium prices for AI should consider whether their investments provide value beyond what Perplexity offers today at a fractional cost. The answer could change the way organizations spend on AI in 2025 and beyond.

While Perplexity’s competitors scramble for reasons to justify their premium pricing thousands of users have already tested Deep Research’s capabilities. Their verdict could be more important than any benchmark. In AI’s new world, the best technology may not be the most expensive — it might just be the one people actually use.

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