Perplexity has develop into the most recent AI firm to launch an in-depth analysis device, with a brand new function introduced Friday.

Google unveiled a similar feature for its Gemini AI platform in December. Then OpenAI launched its own research agent earlier this month. All three corporations even have given the function the identical identify: Deep Analysis.

The objective is to offer extra in-depth solutions with actual citations for extra skilled use circumstances, in comparison with what you’d get from a client chatbot. In a blog post saying Deep Analysis, Perplexity wrote that the function “excels at a spread of expert-level duties—from finance and advertising and marketing to product analysis.”

Perplexity Deep Analysis is at present out there on the internet, and the corporate stated it can quickly be added to its Mac, iOS, and Android apps. To make use of it, you simply choose “Deep Analysis” from a drop-down menu while you submit your question in Perplexity, which can then create an in depth report that may be exported as a PDF or shared as a Perplexity Web page.

To create this report, Perplexity stated Deep Analysis “iteratively searches, reads paperwork, and causes about what to do subsequent, refining its analysis plan because it learns extra concerning the topic areas,” supposedly “just like how a human may analysis a brand new matter.”

The corporate additionally highlighted its efficiency on Humanity’s Last Exam, an AI benchmarking check with expert-level questions in a wide range of educational fields. Perplexity stated its Deep Analysis device scored 21.1% on the check, simply beating most different fashions, akin to Gemini Pondering (6.2%), Grok-2 (3.8%), and OpenAI’s GPT-4o (3.3%) — however not fairly matching OpenAI’s Deep Analysis (26.6%).

However whilst you at present want a $200-per-month Professional subscription to make use of OpenAI’s Deep Analysis (the corporate plans to broaden to different subscription tiers), Perplexity’s Deep Analysis is accessible free of charge — non-subscribers get an unspecified-but-limited variety of queries per day, whereas paying subscribers get limitless queries. 

Perplexity’s Deep Analysis additionally appears to carry out extra rapidly, finishing most duties in beneath three minutes in comparison with 5 to half-hour for OpenAI Deep Analysis.

Requested to check the various deep research products, Perplexity provided an outline of the totally different applied sciences, pricing fashions, and efficiency in several use circumstances and topic issues, with hyperlinks to articles about every function). It summarized the variations as follows:

• Perplexity AI excels in velocity and accessibility for informal researchers
• OpenAI dominates in analytical depth for enterprise functions
• Google integrates most seamlessly with current productiveness ecosystems

Whereas it’s too early to know the way these instruments will have an effect on on a regular basis {and professional} analysis as they develop into extra in style, The Economist recently highlighted shortcomings to OpenAI’s Deep Analysis that doubtless apply right here too: not simply limitations to its “creativity” in decoding knowledge and a bent to depend on sources which might be “simply out there,” however a bigger danger that “outsourcing all of your analysis to a supergenius assistant” might “scale back the variety of alternatives to have your finest concepts.”