Perplexity launches new “in-depth research” tool to challenge industry giants

Recently, AI company Perplexity released a new "in-depth research" function, joining the competition between Google and OpenAI. The tool aims to provide professional users with more detailed and reliable research answers, and is named as the same "Deep Research" as other peers to drive industry technology forward.

Perplexity’s “In-depth Research” tool is now available through web pages and will be integrated into Mac, iOS and Android applications in the future. Users simply select "In-depth Research" when querying to generate a detailed report that supports PDF export or Perplexity page sharing.

The highlight of this function lies in its powerful research ability. The system will iteratively search, read documents and think about the next research direction, simulating the thinking process of human researchers. In the AI ​​benchmark, Perplexity's "In-depth Research" score reached 21.1%, far exceeding other models such as Gemini Thinking (6.2%) and Grok-2 (3.8%), but still slightly inferior to OpenAI's "In-depth Research" score. (26.6%).

Unlike OpenAI's paid version of "In-depth Research" for $200 per month subscription, Perplexity offers free use, and although non-subscribers have limited daily queries, paid users can enjoy unlimited queries. Its task processing speed is also relatively fast, and most tasks are completed in three minutes, which is significantly better than OpenAI's 5 to 30 minutes.

Perplexity points out that its tools are outstanding in terms of speed and convenience and are suitable for casual researchers, while OpenAI has an advantage in the analysis depth of enterprise applications. Google has a place with its good productivity ecosystem integration.

Nevertheless, The Economist recently pointed out that relying on AI tools for research may limit human creative exploration, which also applies to the new features of Perplexity. While these tools are expected to have a significant impact on daily and professional research, how to balance the relationship between artificial intelligence and creative thinking remains the key to future development