perplexity Perplexity

Powerful Answer Engine

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine and assistant designed to help you find, understand, and act on information with minimal effort. The assistant can help complete everyday tasks, not just answer questions. Perplexity Assistant launched as part of the Perplexity app in January 2025 on Android and in April 2025 on iOS.

The Perplexity AI-powered answer engine is designed to give users direct, real-time answers to questions instead of a traditional lists of links. It combines large language models with live web search to produce responses that are accurate, sourced, and up-to-date. According to Perplexity's own platform description, it is a "free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question."

perplexity

what is it What is Perplexity

A search and reasoning AI: It combines live web search with large language models to give concise, sourced answers instead of just a list of links.

A personal assistant: On mobile and in the Comet browser, it can also help with tasks like summarizing emails, managing tabs, drafting replies, or even booking reservations (in supported flows).

A research workspace: With features like Threads, Spaces, Deep Research, and file upload, it can act as a research companion that remembers context and organizes work over time.

 

history Perplexity History

Even though it is a relatively young company, Perplexity has a rich history since it rode the first big wave of LLMs and conversational search following the release of ChatGPT.

Perplexity AI, Inc. was founded in August 2022 by Aravind Srinivas (CEO), Denis Yarats (CTO), Johnny Ho (Chief Strategy Officer), and Andy Konwinski (President), all with deep experience at places like OpenAI, Meta, Quora, Databricks, and in large‑scale back‑end systems.

The core idea for the company grew out of frustration with classic search: scrolling through "10 blue links" instead of getting a direct answer with cogent explanations. Srinivas wanted a conversational answer engine that gave concise responses with citations, combining the strengths of search and chatbots.

The team's first public product, Bird SQL, launched in December 2022; it used an OpenAI Codex‑based interface to turn natural‑language questions into SQL and query Twitter data, even attracting interest from Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter.

In parallel, Perplexity launched its flagship conversational search engine (Perplexity.ai) on December 7, 2022, a few weeks after ChatGPT, offering direct, LLM‑generated answers with inline citations. It marked a notable contrast to early ChatGPT, which didn't show sources. When Twitter shut down free API access in early 2023, Bird SQL became unsustainable, pushing the company to focus fully on the general‑web answer engine.

Initially, Perplexity used OpenAI's GPT‑3.5 for generation and Bing for web results, but over time it added its own online‑optimized LLMs (PPLX models) built on open‑source foundations like Mistral‑7B and LLaMA‑2 70B to improve speed, control, and cost. The product gained traction as a "search that talks back," emphasizing speed, citations, and threaded follow‑ups. Investors including Jeff Bezos and top VC firms backed the company as a serious challenger in AI search. The company later released browser extensions and mobile apps (iOS, Android), extending the same answer‑engine experience beyond the web interface.

 

what What Perplexity Does

At a high level, Perplexity:

 

how How Perplexity Works

Under the hood, Perplexity combines a large language model with real-time web access. It runs your query through a LLM that decides what to search for, fetches relevant pages, and then writes a coherent answer grounded in those sources.

Perplexity uses multi-step reasoning. For harder tasks, it decomposes the query into subtasks: searching, checking multiple sources, and iteratively refining the answer. It maintains conversational context, keeping track of prior messages in a thread, so follow-up questions can be shorter ("What about in the US?") and still be correctly interpreted.

Perplexity provides transparency by default. Answers include citations and expandable source panels, making it clear where information came from and helping users judge reliability.

On mobile and in Comet, a system-level assistant layer interprets your voice/text commands, then translates them into actions (open this app, fill this form, draft this reply) while still using the same reasoning and search capabilities.

Comet Assistant AI is an agentic web browser, designed as a personal AI assistant to perform tasks across your open tabs, handle complex searches, summarize information, and even draft emails or book appointments, offering control and privacy features. It acts like a smart, proactive browser that understands natural language, working across multiple tabs simultaneously to synthesize data for tasks like research, planning, or data entry.

 

comet Comet

Perplexity Comet is an AI-powered web browser created by Perplexity AI. Instead of treating AI as an add-on or extension, Comet builds the assistant directly into the browser itself, making it an active participant in how you search, read, and work online. It's based on Chromium, the same engine behind Google Chrome, which means it supports Chrome extensions and feels familiar to anyone who has used Chrome.

The defining feature of Comet is its native AI assistant. This assistant can summarize webpages, compare information across multiple tabs, draft emails, build simple websites, create study plans, shop for items, and even analyze PDFs or YouTube videos. Instead of switching between tabs or copying text into a separate AI tool, the assistant works alongside whatever you're viewing, turning browsing into a more interactive, cognitive experience.

Comet launched in July 2025 for Windows and macOS, and later expanded to Android in November 2025. Initially, it was restricted to Perplexity's highest-tier subscribers, but it became free for everyone in October 2025, which dramatically expanded its user base. Perplexity has also been updating its mobile and tablet apps to match the browser's capabilities, especially on iPad, where the interface now mirrors the desktop experience and supports multitasking features like split-screen.

Why did Perplexity make Comet free? Perplexity says demand was overwhelming, and the company wanted universal access. Perplexity states that after the limited July release, millions of people joined the waitlist "faster than we've been able to release it," and that Comet became "the most sought-after AI product of the year." They concluded that people clearly wanted the browser, so keeping it gated behind a subscription or waitlist no longer made sense. Perplexity frames the move as part of its broader mission to make the internet more accessible and more intelligent. Their announcement states that releasing Comet for free is part of creating a radically better internet.

AI browsers like Comet are powerful, but they also raise new security concerns. Because the browser actively interprets and processes page content, the Gartner Group has warned enterprises that AI browsers may introduce risks such as unintentional data exposure or "irreversible and untraceable" data loss. As a result, Gartner recommends that organizations block AI browsers - including Comet - until the technology matures and security practices catch up.

Comet represents a shift in how people interact with the web. Traditional browsers focus on navigation: opening tabs, loading pages, and displaying content. Comet moves toward cognition, where the browser helps you think, analyze, and act. It's part of a broader trend in which companies like Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity are competing to redefine the browser as the primary interface for AI-assisted work and research.

 

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