What Is Perplexity AI, and How Do You Use the Popular Chatbot?

The AI tools are coming fast, and to add to the seemingly never-ending list of new AI products is Perplexity AI. The name doesn’t immediately mean much unless you’re somewhat versed in AI terminology, but it could be one of the most useful AI tools out today, depending on your needs.

How useful? Consider that the CEO of AI juggernaut NVIDIA, Jensen Huang, says that he uses Perplexity AI “almost every day” for research, it’s clear that the rest of us should at the very least know what Perplexity is all about.

What Exactly Is Perplexity AI?

In the simplest terms possible, Perplexity AI is a conversational AI search engine. Yes, that makes it sound a little like Microsoft’s GPT-based search engine efforts, or using ChatGPT with it’s web-search plugin. However, Perplexity is built from the ground up to be an AI-powered search engine, and not a chatbot with a search engine bolted to it.

The founders of Perplexity (the company was started in 2022) saw a problem with the Large Language Model technology they were working with. While these models are powerful and contain immense knowledge, getting that knowledge out in a useful way can be challenging. You’ve probably heard how bots like ChatGPT can “hallucinate” made-up facts or otherwise be unreliable.

Perplexity is designed to give accurate answers, to provide citations for everything, and to help guide you through your research to find the right information in a useful order and format.

It’s important to note that there are two tiers of Perplexity; a free version and then a paid “Pro” mode, which costs about $20 monthly, unless you pay annually, in which case you effectively get two months for free. The key differentiators of Pro mode are as follows:

• True conversational search, with the AI prompting you with more questions to help you refine your search.
• Results are more personalized and less generic.
• The ability to switch AI models, letting you use GPT-4 Turbo, Claude 2.1, Mistral’s Le Large, and, of course, Perplexity’s own in-house model.

You get 600 Pro uses per day, but you can always switch to the standard mode for simpler queries.

How To Use Perplexity

If you know how to use existing search engines, then you’re pretty much 90% of the way there with Perplexity. There are apps for Android and iOS, but here I will be using the desktop browser version of the platform as an example.

If you’ve used ChatGPT, the interface for Perplexity will be quite familiar. All you have to do is type your question and Perplexity will search the web and its own knowledge to compile a summary. Everything it states comes with a source link that you can read and verify yourself.

Your searches are saved in the left-hand pane under “Library” so you can go through the information later or add more to that thread. This makes Perplexity an enormously useful research tool for almost anyone. The aforementioned Pro version looks and operates the same.

In all honestly, I did not feel the need to subscribe to Perplexity Pro after trying it, but I can definitely see it benefitting someone who isn’t experienced or trained in research. As a virtual research assistant, it makes a lot of sense for people in various types of knowledge-based jobs. Since half the battle is knowing the right questions to ask, the Pro version of this AI search engine can take care of that for you.

If, however, you’re already pretty good at web search without the help of AI, the standard free version of Perplexity will likely provide all the supercharging you need when it comes to finding information and I can definitely recommend it as an essential stop on the web whenever you’re trying to grasp a new topic quickly.