Perplexity launches Deep Research tool for free

AI startup Perplexity has released its own AI research tool called Deep Research to help users get in-depth answers with citations for more complex queries. This update comes after OpenAI and Google launched similar features very recently. 

“It [Deep Research] excels at a range of expert-level tasks—from finance and marketing to product research—and attains high benchmarks on Humanity’s Last Exam,” the company said in blog. 

(Humanity’s Last Exam is an AI benchmark that tests models on expert-level questions from multiple fields)  

The blog claimed that Perplexity’s Deep Research scored 21.1% on the test, beating other reasoning AI models including Grok-2, which scored 3.8%, Gemini Thinking, which scored 6.25% , and OpenAI’s GPT-4o, which scored 3.3%. However, it is still behind OpenAI’s Deep Research, which scored 26.6%.

Notably, Perplexity’s Deep Research has been made free for all unlike OpenAI’s Deep Research, which is available for ChatGPT Pro users paying $200 per month. While Pro subscribers will get unlimited queries, non-subscribers will get a limited number of questions in hand per day.

The tool is available currently on web and will be rolled out soon to iOS, Android and Mac. 

Users can go to the Perplexity AI website and choose ‘Deep Research’ from the options for mode in search and then type in their query. 

In December last year, the Aravind Srinivas-led startup raised $500 million in a funding round led by Institutional Venture Partners which valued it at $9 billion.