AI search start-up Perplexity has ramped up its competitors with Google by releasing Comet, its new net browser, on Wednesday.
Constructed upon Perplexity’s proprietary search engine, Comet is appropriate with “your entire typical extensions, settings, and bookmarks,” in response to a Perplexity weblog, that means it is “a seamless swap” to make it your new default browser. It is initially being launched for Mac and Home windows, with help on different platforms anticipated to reach within the coming months.
Perplexity CEO and cofounder Aravind Srivinas wrote on X Thursday morning that Comet can be accessible on Android units quickly.
“Comet reimagines the browser from the bottom up,” Perplexity wrote on its web site. “It actively helps you ask, perceive, and keep in mind what you see. It connects the dots at lightning pace and assists with distracting duties that steal your focus.”
Within the spirit of collaboration, Comet comes with its personal AI agent, Comet Assistant, which is built-in instantly into the browser and upon which customers can offload a wide range of easy and mundane duties.
You may ask the agent to undergo your unread emails within the morning, pull out the messages out of your coworkers, and supply a fast abstract of every. That requires, in fact, handing over your electronic mail information to Perplexity; the identical goes in your private calendar, notes app, or the rest you need Comet Assistant to have the ability to work together with and extract data from.
It is a good suggestion to overview your office’s AI coverage, if it has one, or verify with a superior earlier than leaking any doubtlessly delicate data to Perplexity or some other chatbot.
Comet is at the moment accessible to subscribers of the corporate’s $200-per-month premium service, Perplexity Max, and to a cohort of early customers who have been invited after becoming a member of a waitlist.
A brand new period of AI-powered search
Launched in 2022, Perplexity’s search engine leverages a group of enormous language fashions (LLMs) to answer person queries with AI-generated summaries, hyperlinks to sources, and strategies for follow-up questions. The corporate has marketed itself as the subsequent part within the evolution of on-line search, with the long-term purpose of usurping the dominant mannequin, pioneered by Google, of responding to person queries with an inventory of related net hyperlinks.
On the similar time, nonetheless, Google is constructing a brand new way forward for Search with its controversial AI Overviews and the extra just lately launched AI Mode, which operates quite a bit like Perplexity. In the meantime, executives at Apple, have reportedly floated the concept of shopping for the up-and-coming AI search start-up, doubtlessly to enhance Safari.
Even with the launch of its new net browser, which can compete with the likes of Google Chrome and Safari, Perplexity has a protracted method to go earlier than it replaces Google because the default search engine for almost all of the inhabitants.
Google’s mannequin has been inimical to exploration and studying, in response to Perplexity: “the net — our best supply of knowledge — was by no means designed to nurture curiosity; as an alternative we have been requested to ‘browse’ it by way of a one-way lens,” the corporate says on its web site. The implication, in fact, is that the corporate’s new mannequin of net search represents a collaboration between people and AI, each actively participating each other to ask deeper questions and uncover new data.
Nonetheless, the net search trade’s accelerating drift in the direction of generative AI strongly means that the energy of Perplexity’s place will solely proceed to develop over time.
