Perplexity adds Deep Research feature to its free AI chatbot

Perplexity has added Deep Research functionality to its free AI chatbot service. This feature allows the AI to correctly answer complex questions by searching the Internet for the latest information it needs as it works through problems step-by-step, much like a human would.

AI chatbots like OpenAI ChatGPT, xAI Grok, Google Gemini, Meta AI, Anthropic Claude, and Perplexity AI have traditionally been trained on a fixed set of input documents and provide answers to prompts based on what they have learned. Unfortunately, this limits their knowledge to the date of training, and they are unaware of anything that has occurred after training.

Additionally, these AI operate by providing the most likely answer from their knowledge store, which prevents them from answering complex questions that require research skills such as integrating and analyzing data to form answers.

Deep Research changes the focus of Perplexity AI from answering quickly to answering correctly, forcing the AI to take more time to think about how it will tackle a complex prompt and the steps it needs to take to do so. At the same time, it can access the Internet in real-time to find the latest relevant information that it needs.

As a result, Perplexity AI is able to ace the SimpleQA AI benchmark test by correctly answering factual questions over 90% of the time. Also, it is able to answer PhD-level questions in Humanity's Last Exam AI benchmark test better than most other AI, with the exception of the recently released OpenAI o3 with deep research functionality.

Unlike OpenAI, which limits its deep research functionality to paid users of ChatGPT, Perplexity is providing Deep Research for free to all users today. Users simply switch from Auto mode to Deep Research mode before submitting their questions to gain access to this feature. Free users can ask a limited number of such prompts per day, while paid users have no such limitations.

Perplexity AI with Deep Research is available for free on the website today, and the functionality will be added to the company's mobile apps soon.