Perplexity AI — The Google Disruptor. The Term Learn Engine is Born?
I have been using Perplexity daily for over 4 months now as a Learn Engine unlike Google, which is a Search Engine. 2023 has been the year that Google’s search engine throne is shaking. So, what makes Perplexity AI the main contestant or a primary threat to Google’s core business?
Perplexity, unsurprisingly, was founded in Silicon Valley, by 4 tech professionals and enthusiasts, who worked in other Silicon Valley tech companies.
Perplexity AI Founding Story
In 2022, Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski established Perplexity AI, leveraging their expertise in back-end systems, AI, and machine learning.
Yarats, formerly a staff machine learning engineer at Quora, joined Perplexity’s AI team.
Srinivas, with internships at DeepMind and Google, later became an AI researcher at OpenAI.
Ho, an engineer at Quora, and Konwinski, part of the founding team at Databricks, contribute to the diverse skill set.
How Does Perplexity AI Work
Perplexity AI introduces a “conversational search engine,” employing AI to create a chatbot-like interface.
Users can pose questions in natural language, receiving responses referencing various web sources. The platform utilizes a contemporary version of PageRank for its search engine.
Some Features Include
Perplexity is Factual
Perplexity AI integrates with advanced models like Claude and GPT-4, which are optimized for factual correctness.
It can retrieve and summarize the latest Google search results to confirm facts and provide a summarization of reference materials for more context.
Perplexity Creates Summaries
It combines information from multiple sources, combines and concisely summarizes them.
Perplexity is Conversational
At the end of each answer, 3 related questions to the topic are listed that the algorithm thinks you may be interested in.
You can simply click on it and learn the answer to that particular question.
Perplexity is a Learn Engine
This may be a new term, but it is how it feels.
When you search in Google, it gives you relevant links that the algorithm considers as most relevant. This means you keep searching for the right answer by clicking on the links.
When you ask Perplexity, it gives you factual answers by creating a concise summary that it created through the top search results it found for the best answer.
This way, you don’t search, but learn, when you ask Perplexity.
How is Perplexity the Next Big Thing?
This is a big moment for learning things online.
After 25 years of Page Ranking and using Google as the market monopoly of learning things online, a new age is born for people to ask any question and find the concise answer instantly.
What is Google? You write a search query and Google gives you the best options it could find online and then, it is for you to search further.
What is Perplexity? You ask a question and you get an instant answer for you to read in a minute and actually learn, and not search anymore.
What are the Key Stats of Perplexity AI?
Website Visits
Perplexity.ai recorded 40.35 million visits in October 2023, maintaining an average session duration of 21:58.
Based on SimilarWeb data from November 2023, Indonesia stands out as the leading country contributing to Perplexity AI’s website traffic, constituting 16.16% of the total visits.
Following closely, the United States secures the second-highest position, contributing significantly with 14.68% of the website’s traffic, succeeded by India and Mexico.
Financial Backing
Across three funding rounds, Perplexity AI has successfully secured a total funding amounting to $52 million.
In the latest funding round, spearheaded by IVP, the company’s valuation soared to an impressive $500 million.
The financing encompasses a $2 million initial funding round in 2022, followed by a $26 million Series A in March 2023, spearheaded by NEA, and an additional $25 million in February 2023, with IVP taking the lead.
The most recent funding round, orchestrated by IVP, propelled the company’s valuation to around $500 million.
Perplexity AI currently achieves an annual recurring revenue of approximately $3 million as of October 2023.
Perplexity may certainly be a game changer or paradigm shift.
It is a game changer because it is changing what searching online means and how accurate it can get.
It may be a paradigm shift since it can shift our view of searching online to learning online accurately, in a much shorter time while learning about things that we didn’t know we needed.
This way, Perplexity AI is certainly a candidate to become the Learn Engine or our companion for learning anything.
The good thing is that Perplexity AI is free to use with no limits of questions you can ask.
Also, the co-founder, Aravind Srinivas, in his interview, says that ads will not be an option as Google sees that as its core business.
Now, the company is focused on growing the user base while developing more features for its goal of becoming the AI engine for learning.
In Silicon Valley, there is a motto, which is different from other places and that is: grow your user base and the money will follow.
Perplexity just celebrated its first anniversary on December 7th, 2023 and it is certainlya candidate to become the next golden startup that everyone has the potential to use as their daily tool for learning.
We can expect to raise a billion dollars in the first 6 months of 2024 and blitzscale (ultra-rapid growth, a term coined by Reid Hoffman) globally.