Perplexity AI, despite initial skepticism as an LLM wrapper, has proven to be a powerful tool for various tasks, offering a range of LLMs like Claude 3.7 Sonnet and GPT-4.5.
The company developed its own LLM, Sonar, based on Meta's Llama 3.3 70B and Cerebras Inference, claiming to be the fastest AI inference engine with a 1,200 tokens per second capacity.
Endorsed by figures like NVIDIA's Jensen Huang and IIT professor Balaraman Ravindran, Perplexity AI has announced operations in India and offers free access to IIT Madras students.
Through partnerships with Paytm and Deutsche Telekom, expanding services, open-sourced models like R1 1776, and the release of the Perplexity Windows app, the company is making significant strides.
While facing challenges of maintaining speed as they grow, CEO Aravind Srinivas aims to enhance monetization by providing users with end-to-end solutions, integrating actions like purchases within the platform.
Despite growth and challenges, Perplexity AI continues to innovate and evolve, with an increasing user base currently at 15 million users per month.