Perplexity AI

Perplexity is an AI-powered answer engine. It is designed for research, learning, and everyday queries, with follow-up question support. It lets you ask questions in natural language and get direct, conversational answers pulled from real-time web searches.

Understanding the Perplexity Ecosystem

Perplexity’s ecosystem is built on a search-first architecture that prioritizes live information over static training data. It utilizes the below elements to deliver its answers.

1. Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

The core of Perplexity is the Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). When you ask a question, the system performs a live web search, extracts snippets from top results, and feeds those snippets into an LLM to generate a final answer. This process ensures that the response consists of verifiable facts and clear citations, thereby reducing hallucinations.

2. Multi-Model Flexibility

Perplexity provides Pro plan users the ability to choose a model. You can toggle between different LLMs, such as GPT-5.2, Claude 4.5 Sonnet, Gemini 3 Pro, Grok 4.1 or Perplexity’s own Sonar models to generate the responses.

3. Verifiability and Collaboration

Perplexity ensures verifiability through mandatory inline citations; every claim is linked to a specific web-based source.

For teams, Perplexity has introduced Spaces which allows collaboration on research projects by saving cited answers and files into shared folders. 

Niche Experiences offered by Perplexity

Perplexity AI also has the following niche offerings:

Perplexity Finance: It is a dedicated experience inside Perplexity for investors that gives real-time stock prices, earnings data, peer comparisons, and basic analytics, using feeds like Financial Modeling Prep and including AI summaries plus citations on top. 

Perplexity Discover: It is a personalized feed of AI-curated stories and topics, similar to Google Discover, that highlights recent articles from across the web to help users continuously explore and learn about topics that interest them. 

Comet Browser: Perplexity Launched Comet browser and Comet Assistant in July 2025 to integrate AI search into general web navigation. Comet offers agentic AI capabilities like browsing websites and taking action like filling forms, interacting with the elements on the website etc. 

How is Perplexity Different from ChatGPT, Gemini etc.?

• Perplexity is built as an answer engine that leans on live web search and shows citations by default, rather than as a stand‑alone chat model generating answers from its training data with knowledge cutoff dates.
• Instead of being tied to a single in‑house model (like OpenAI-only or Gemini-only), Perplexity lets you choose among Sonar, OpenAI GPT, Claude Sonnet, Gemini Pro etc. to generate the answers.
  
  

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