Perplexity AI, the maker of the popular chat program bearing the same name, announced on Thursday that it is introducing a couple of new features that promise to give users more flexibility in terms of the types of sources they use: internal knowledge search and spaces.
Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity AI, wrote on X (formerly Twitter): “Today, we are launching Perplexity for Internal Search: a single tool to search both the web and your team’s files through multi-step reasoning and code execution.” Previously, users were able to upload personal files for the AI to read and respond to, in the same way they could with Gemini, ChatGPT, or Copilot. With internal search, Perplexity will now search both those personal documents and the internet to infer its response.
Today, we are launching Perplexity for Internal Search: a single tool to search both the web and your team’s files through multi-step reasoning and code execution. pic.twitter.com/ftZGNgziBW
– Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) October 17, 2024
The company wrote in a blog post announcement: “The ability to conduct all your research – across internal and external data sources – on a single unified knowledge platform will unlock massive productivity gains for every enterprise.” The company notes that early adopters like financial services companies have used internal search “to do more due diligence by leveraging internal research, communication notes, and latest industry news.”
On the other hand, Spaces is described as a “AI-powered search and collaboration hub” by the company, allowing you to customize and configure your Perplexity AI assistant to fit the data and requirements of the specific project. You will be able to choose their preferred LLM model and specify how the model will interact with their inputs and instructions.
The company automatically opts Enterprise Pro customers out of using their own data to continue training its AI, although regular Pro users will need to manually opt out through the settings menu. The company wrote: “We understand the sensitivity of the data our clients work with, and we are committed to ensuring Perplexity provides the highest levels of security and privacy, enabling teams to conduct their most critical research without any compromises,” noting that it plans to integrate Crunchbase and FactSet soon for Enterprise Pro customers as well.
The new features will first be available to Perplexity Pro and Enterprise Pro subscribers. The cost of the Professional plan is $20 per month, in line with the prices imposed by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic for their individual subscriptions. The price for Enterprise Pro goes up to $40 per month per user.
While Perplexity has been highly successful among its users, the company has not fared as well among many websites that extract their training data from them.
In 2024 alone, Perplexity was “accused” of directly “stealing” new articles from CNBC and Forbes (the latter now threatening legal action); cease and desist letters were sent by both The New York Times and Conde Nast; Wired accused them of blatant literary theft. In the case of Forbes, it is said that Perplexity’s AI chatbot produced a near verbatim copy of a premium paywalled exclusive report on former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s military drone ambitions, which was viewed nearly 30,000 times.
