SoftBank Corp has announced a partnership with generative AI search startup Perplexity. Beginning June 19, 2024, SoftBank will offer customers of its ‘SoftBank,’ ‘Y!mobile,’ and ‘LINEMO’ mobile services a one-year free subscription to the premium version of Perplexity’s AI answer engine.
Excited to be partnering with @SoftBank to grow Perplexity in Japan! pic.twitter.com/ePCZYCywpl
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) June 17, 2024
The service, Perplexity Pro, typically costs 2,950 yen per month or 29,500 yen annually. This trial offer will allow users to access advanced features of the AI-powered answer engine, which provides accurate responses based on the latest internet information while displaying the sources for reliability.
Perplexity can be used via web browsers and apps. The premium version, Perplexity Pro, offers users the ability to select from different advanced large language models for a more comprehensive experience. This exclusive trial is available only to SoftBank’s three mobile brands and will begin accepting applications at 9:00 AM on June 19th.
For more information on the one-year free trial of Perplexity Pro, customers can visit the SoftBank website.
Perplexity AI chief Aravind Srinivas is currently in Tokyo and will meet developers on June 20, 2024. .
Meanwhile, Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based developer of LLM company, founded last year by Google DeepMind alumni, is raising approximately $100 million in new financing. The round is co-led by New Enterprise Associates, with participation from existing investors Lux Capital and Khosla Ventures.
OpenAI recently announced that it is opening its first office in Tokyo, Japan. The company is unveiling a GPT-4 custom optimised for the Japanese language. The company also plans to release the custom model more broadly in the API in the coming months.
Perplexity AI recently raised $63M at a $1B valuation, led by Daniel Gross and others, including Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA, to fuel its global expansion, alongside enhancing its AI-driven search capabilities, and disrupt the traditional search market with its conversational AI service.
The round also saw Stanley Druckenmiller, Tobi Lutke, Garry Tan, Andrej Karpathy, Dylan Field, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, IVP, NEA, Jakob Uszkoreit, Naval Ravikant, Brad Gerstner and Lip-Bu Tan among others.