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Perplexity<\/a> has become the latest AI company to release an in-depth research tool, with a new feature announced Friday.<\/p>\n Google unveiled a similar feature<\/a> for its Gemini AI platform in December. Then OpenAI launched its own research agent<\/a> earlier this month. All three companies even have given the feature the same name: Deep Research.<\/p>\n The goal is to provide more in-depth answers with real citations for more professional use cases, compared to what you\u2019d get from a consumer chatbot. In a blog post<\/a> announcing Deep Research, Perplexity wrote that the feature \u201cexcels at a range of expert-level tasks\u2014from finance and marketing to product research.\u201d<\/p>\n Perplexity Deep Research is currently available on the web, and the company said it will soon be added to its Mac, iOS, and Android apps. To use it, you just select \u201cDeep Research\u201d from a drop-down menu when you submit your query in Perplexity, which will then create a detailed report that can be exported as a PDF or shared as a Perplexity Page.<\/p>\n To create this report, Perplexity said Deep Research \u201citeratively searches, reads documents, and reasons about what to do next, refining its research plan as it learns more about the subject areas,\u201d supposedly \u201csimilar to how a human might research a new topic.\u201d<\/p>\n The company also highlighted its performance on Humanity\u2019s Last Exam<\/a>, an AI benchmarking test with expert-level questions in a variety of academic fields. Perplexity said its Deep Research tool scored 21.1% on the test, easily beating most other models, such as Gemini Thinking (6.2%), Grok-2 (3.8%), and OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4o (3.3%) \u2014 but not quite matching OpenAI\u2019s Deep Research (26.6%).<\/p>\n But while you currently need a $200-per-month Pro subscription to use OpenAI\u2019s Deep Research (the company plans to expand to other subscription tiers), Perplexity\u2019s Deep Research is available for free \u2014 non-subscribers get an unspecified-but-limited number of queries per day, while paying subscribers get unlimited queries.\u00a0<\/p>\n Perplexity\u2019s Deep Research also seems to perform more quickly, completing most tasks in under three minutes compared to 5 to 30 minutes for OpenAI Deep Research.<\/p>\n Asked to compare the various deep research products<\/a>, Perplexity offered an overview of the different technologies, pricing models, and performance in different use cases and subject matters, with links to articles about each feature). It summarized the differences as follows:<\/p>\n While it\u2019s too early to know how these tools will affect everyday and professional research as they become more popular, The Economist recently highlighted<\/a> shortcomings to OpenAI\u2019s Deep Research that likely apply here too: not just limitations to its \u201ccreativity\u201d in interpreting data and a tendency to rely on sources that are \u201ceasily available,\u201d but a larger risk that \u201coutsourcing all your research to a supergenius assistant\u201d could \u201creduce the number of opportunities to have your best ideas.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n