What is Perplexity? Apple plans to acquire the AI search engine Perplexity.

Apple is in talks to acquire Perplexity, which is the hottest new darling in Silicon Valley today: the artificial intelligence search engine “Perplexity”. It went live in August 2022, has been in business for just over a year, and has an annual revenue of more than $10 million. The number of monthly active users has even surpassed the 50 million mark, and the company is valued at $520 million. According to the Wall Street Journal, the company is preparing for the next round of financing, with a valuation of up to $1 billion, and investors include big names like Bezos.

Perplexity is an emerging search engine that plans to challenge the dominance of traditional search engines such as Google. It uses artificial intelligence technology of large language models to provide users with more direct, accurate, and structured answers, rather than just traditional search result lists.

The founding team of Perplexity consists of four experts with rich experience in the field of artificial intelligence. Aravind Srinivas has interned at Google and DeepMind and worked at OpenAI, Yarats has experience as an artificial intelligence researcher or engineer at Microsoft Bing, Q&A website Quora, and Facebook, Konwinski is a co-founder of DataBricks, and Johnny Ho was an engineer at Quora, responsible for ranking and backend systems.

Perplexity provides users with an intuitive search experience through a simple interface and a Generative UI organized by structured answers generated based on user queries. Users can ask questions in natural language, and Perplexity will integrate the content and give clear answers, while supporting traceability and further inquiries.

Perplexity has introduced some innovative features, such as Copilot (interactive research assistant feature), which can automatically add approximate words to queries to improve the accuracy of search results; Collections (favorites feature), allowing users to save and share search result pages; Profile (personalization settings), and Discover (discover popular search results).

Perplexity combines search engines and large language models (LLMs), and provides services to users by re-understanding user questions, invoking search engine APIs, proprietary sorting algorithms, and LLM to generate answers.

Perplexity positions itself as the next-generation search engine, that is, the answer engine, aiming to provide a more accurate and fast way to obtain information than traditional search engines. Its emergence heralds a significant change in the form of search engines, especially in the context of information overload, where users are more eager to quickly obtain accurate answers.

As a search engine, Perplexity is providing users with a new way to access information through its unique product features and innovative functions, while also bringing new vitality and competition to the search engine market.