California-based conversational search engine Perplexity is taking a step ahead with its new upgrade, introducing new shopping features that go beyond traditional search capabilities.
CEO Aravind Srinivas believes Perplexity can be India’s AI app. His recent tweet suggested market potential for the search engine in India, which, if implemented, would have interesting vernacular use cases. While Perplexity doesn’t possess its own foundational LLM, the company asserts that it provides substantial value. It currently manages over 100 million queries weekly with the goal of scaling to 100 million queries daily.
Srinivas has been bullish about expanding the company’s presence. In India, many founders and developers are already building on existing LLMs creating value at the application layer.
ChatGPT Moment for Shopping?
This comes after Perplexity launched a new shopping feature for its pro users in the US, where users can research and purchase products. The AI commerce experience, ‘Buy with Pro’, lets users check out pick products from select merchants on the website or app, and place their order. Additionally, a visual search tool called ‘Snap to Shop’ displays relevant products, only requiring shoppers to take a photo of the product they wish to purchase.
Srinivas took to X to share how the platform is evolving from a research tool to one that is revolutionising commerce.
“I don’t quite think it’s the ChatGPT moment for shopping. But I think the future is looking bright for customers to find and buy what they want much faster without ads and spam. Some more work needs to be done to feel true magic. We’re on it,” he said, highlighting his focus on removing ads and spam for a cleaner, user-friendly shopping experience.
With this new feature, Perplexity competes with Google’s lens feature, Amazon’s Rufus assistant, and Walmart’s GenAI recommendation tool, but reportedly stands out by offering direct purchasing through its search engine.
This strategy highlights the increasing adoption of generative AI to improve product discovery and streamline e-commerce transactions, and Perplexity is determined to stay ahead in this space.
What’s Perplexity’s Moat?
The new shopping feature comes amid intensifying competition in the search market, after OpenAI’s recent announcement of its ‘SearchGPT’ integration into ChatGPT. The company has been steadily expanding its capabilities by adding new features like Perplexity Spaces, a finance analysis tool, an internal file search engine, and advanced reasoning mode.
Perplexity has introduced innovative ways to streamline information during key events.
During NVIDIA’s earnings call yesterday, ‘Perplexity Finance’ offered live transcripts and key highlights, which will soon expand to major stocks. A similar real-time experiment was done for the US elections, where Perplexity partnered with The Associated Press and Democracy Works to create an election information hub that included live updates, real-time vote counts, and personalised ballot details. Srinivas expressed disappointment over traditional news websites lacking proper coverage.
Perplexity is often touted as a GPT wrapper. Commenting on the nature of wrappers on the value addition aspect, Srinivas further said, “Wrappers are at all levels; it’s just that they have given you so much value that you do not care.”
Amazon chief Jeff Bezos has invested in Perplexity AI, showing his confidence in its potential to innovate AI search. Even NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang praised the tool, revealing he uses it “almost every day” for its practical benefits. Notably, Meta’s chief AI scientist, Yann LeCun, who strongly advocates ethical and moral AI practices, was involved in the company’s early funding rounds. Even at an event at Carnegie Mellon University, the host used Perplexity AI to create questions for Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
On competing with players like Google today, Srinivas said, “Every single query on Perplexity, on average, has 10-11 words. Every query on Google has about two to three words, so users have much higher intent with each query, allowing them to ask more targeted questions.”
Expansion Mode On
Reports suggest that Perplexity is also preparing to raise funds at a valuation of $9 billion, which would be its fourth round this year.
This funding will help Perplexity expand into newer markets and fight its legal battles.
In August, Perplexity signed a revenue-sharing deal with publishers like TIME, Der Spiegel, and Fortune after plagiarism allegations. It soon faced lawsuits from News Corp, which owns The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, for copyright violations, and The New York Times for AI scraping, intensifying financial pressures amid growing plagiarism disputes. Srinivas criticised News Corp’s lawsuit, calling it a counterproductive and unnecessary conflict between media and tech, urging collaboration to create innovative tools and expand business opportunities.
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