Perplexity's Pitch: What if your AI cloud could show its work?

Time of India

7 days ago

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ChatGPT, Gemini, and other similar kinds of generative AI models rely heavily on pre-trained knowledge and can sometimes confabulate. Perplexity , on the other hand, holds itself out as an answer engine that cites every fact it presents. It pulls information from verified web sources in real time, offering users not just answers but also context. Every answer generated has clearly marked citations, enabling users to verify the source material; this design choice has made the platform popular among researchers, journalists, and students.Its minimalist interface lets users ask natural language questions and receive concise, sourced summaries, along with features like 'Quick View' for topic breakdowns, follow-up questions, and related research links. The model's Pro version, powered by GPT-4 and Claude 3, enhances its abilities, thereby including code generation, academic search, file-based queries, and providing professional research tools, making it much more valuable, not just as a consumer product, but also in enterprise and productivity workflows.Perplexity's UI is notably similar to Google Search's, just stripped of the advertisements, the sponsored content, and the SEO clutter. Delivering a cleaner, faster, and increasingly trustworthy search experience. It satiates the users who have become skeptical of the black box AI outputs with its citation-first architectures.Resonating with this broader mission of aiming to build an AI that users can trust, Perplexity's co-founder and CEO, Aravind Srinivas , shared his personal commitment to India's open-source AI ecosystem.'I am ready to invest $1 million personally and 5 hours/week of my time into the most qualified group of people that can do this right now for making India great again in the context of AI,' he wrote. 'Consider this as a commitment that cannot be backtracked. The team has to be cracked and obsessed like the DeepSeek team and has to open-source the models with an MIT license". This echoes a deeper belief in not just building a better search engine but rather building it with and for the global south (India in particular).Up until early 2024, the company has raised $73.6 million at a valuation of around $520 million, with investors including NEA, Jeff Bezos (via Bezos Expeditions), Nvidia, and Elad Gil. This funding gave Perplexity the resources to climb up the ladder at a faster pace and invest in infrastructure, partnerships, and continued LLM integration.Even though the company is only a fraction of Google's size, Perplexity's growth signals a paradigm shift: users increasingly want AI that explains its reasoning and shows its work. For Indian users and enterprises looking at AI-enhanced workflows from compliance to research to content creation, Perplexity represents a next-gen alternative where generative AI meets verifiability.Building atop this potential, Srinivas has made clear that India is central to Perplexity's strategic roadmap. 'I am looking to recruit someone to work together on growing Perplexity in India. It will be fun and intense. You must be based in India and willing to travel and meet with strategic partners and institutions—scrappy startup mode,' he noted, his statement reflecting the company's intent to not just serve Indian users but to co-build its ecosystem here, tapping into local partnerships, talent, and institutions.As the AI-native search race heats up, Perplexity's citation-based approach might not just compete with traditional search; it could redefine what 'trust' in an AI answer really means.