Perplexity reframed AI as search. Every Perplexity response includes citations to source URLs the model used; users can dig into sources without taking the model's word for anything. Founded 2022 by Aravind Srinivas. By 2026 they've expanded to Perplexity Pro ($20/mo) and Perplexity Comet (an AI browser). Use cases: research, journalism, fact-finding, market intelligence, anything where 'where did you get that?' matters. The trade-off vs ChatGPT: Perplexity is research-focused (better citations, narrower features), ChatGPT is general-purpose (better at coding, writing, voice, images). Many people use both.
GLOSSARY
What is Perplexity?
Conversational AI search engine — every answer cites real-time web sources. The 'AI search' alternative to ChatGPT.
RELATED TERMS
LLM (Large Language Model)
An AI system trained on massive text datasets to predict and generate human-like text — the technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and most modern AI chatbots.
Chatbot
An AI-powered conversational interface — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, customer support bots, and assistants — built on LLMs in modern usage.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
A technique that lets an LLM answer questions about information it wasn't trained on — by retrieving relevant documents at query time and stuffing them into the prompt.
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