Perplexity AI is becoming a hot topic recently having secured some well-known investors and a recent partnership with Rabbit. So what’s all the hype about?
Similar to ChatGPT, Perplexity AI is a large language model aimed at answering natural language questions, primarily used for research and learning. However, Perplexity stands out from other AI tools by providing links to sources and suggestions in response to your queries; enabling you to fact check the response as well as do your own further research.
Here’s an example where I asked what I should include about Perplexity AI when writing this thread:
As you can see, it suggests some questions for inspiration on the homepage and also allows you to free-type any question you wish. If you’ve got co-pilot enabled, it may ask you follow up questions to refine its answer before providing it. Users on the free plan are allowed 5 co-pilot queries every 4 hours. Without co-pilot enabled, Perplexity will answer your initial question without asking any questions back to you.
It then provided sources and wrote a clear answer to my question, citing its references at the end of each sentence or section. Lastly, there’s a related questions section and the opportunity to ask a follow up question within the same thread.
As with other chat AI tools, you can organise your questions into separate threads. I’ve also briefly used Perplexity to ask the best transport method from one destination to another with heavy luggage. It provided some information and sources that I hadn’t yet found myself with Google! I’m definitely going to keep experimenting with it to help me plan my next holiday.
There’s also a nice widget available:
From here you can directly ask a question, enable co-pilot, use Google Assistant to type or visit the discovery tab. If you have Perplexity Pro, you can also use the image upload option. However, this costs $20 p/month. Sadly, without Pro the image button is useless and just prompts you to purchase Pro. With Pro, you have access to “over 300 daily queries” with co-pilot as well as the option to choose your preferred AI model from GPT-4, Claude 2.1, Gemini, or Perplexity.
Perplexity AI is available both on web and as an app.
I’d love to hear your thoughts! Do you use AI tools? What’s your favourite AI tool? Could Perplexity take over the number 1 AI tool spot?
