AI Research Tool from Perplexity Is Priced to Undercut the Competition

February 26, 2025

Are prices for AI-generated research too darn high? One firm thinks so. In a Temu-type bid to take over the market, reports VentureBeat, "Perplexity Just Made AI Research Crazy Cheap—What that Means for the Industry." CEO Aravind Srinivas credits open source software for making the move possible, opining that "knowledge should be universally accessible." Knowledge, yes. AI research? We are not so sure. Nevertheless, here we are. The write-up describes the difference in pricing:

"While Anthropic and OpenAI charge thousands monthly for their services, Perplexity offers five free queries daily to all users. Pro subscribers pay $20 monthly for 500 daily queries and faster processing — a price point that could force larger AI companies to explain why their services cost up to 100 times more."

Not only is Perplexity’s Deep Research cheaper than the competition, crows the post, its accuracy rivals theirs. We are told:

"[Deep Research] scored 93.9% accuracy on the SimpleQA benchmark and reached 20.5% on Humanity’s Last Exam, outperforming Google’s Gemini Thinking and other leading models. OpenAI’s Deep Research still leads with 26.6% on the same exam, but OpenAI charges $200 percent for that service. Perplexity’s ability to deliver near-enterprise level performance at consumer prices raises important questions about the AI industry’s pricing structure."

Well, okay. Not to stray too far from the point, but is a 20.5% or a 26.6% on Humanity’s Last Exam really something to brag about? Last we checked, those were failing grades. By far. Isn’t it a bit too soon to be outsourcing research to any LLM? But I digress.

We are told the low, low cost Deep Research is bringing AI to the micro-budget masses. And, soon, to the Windows-less—Perplexity is working on versions for iOS, Android, and Mac. Will this spell disaster for the competition?

Cynthia Murrell, February 26, 2025

Written by Stephen E. Arnold · Filed Under AI, Business strategy, Financial, News

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Stephen E. Arnold monitors search, content processing, text mining and related topics from his high-tech nerve center in rural Kentucky. He tries to winnow the goose feathers from the giblets. He works with colleagues worldwide to make this Web log useful to those who want to go "beyond search". Contact him at sa [at] arnoldit.com. His Web site with additional information about search is arnoldit.com.