Perplexity takes on ChatGPT and Gemini with new Deep Research AI that completes most tasks in under 3 minutes

Aravind Srinivas-led Perplexity AI has brought its own Deep Research tool that it claims will help users save hours of time by conducting in-depth research and analysis on their behalf while taking less than 3 minutes for most tasks. Perplexity was already offering DeepSeek R1 on its platform and the addition of Deep Research takes it in direct competition with AI giants like OpenAI and Google. 

Perplexity says its Pro users will have access to 500 daily queries while the free users will get a limited number of answers per day. The new AI tool is already available on Perplexity website and the company says it will soon rollout to iOS, Android and Mac versions of its apps. 

How does Perplexity’s Deep Research work? 

Perplexity states that its Deep Research tool performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources and reasons about what to do next, similar to how a human researcher may go about a topic.  After finalizing the source material, the AI agent synthesizes all the information in a ‘clear and comprehensive report’ which can either be exported in the form of PDF or a Perplexity page that can be shared with friends and family.

Perplexity says Deep Research can help provide ‘expert-level analysis’ across a range of complex topics, including finance, marketing and technology. The company also states that Deep Research can act as ‘personal consultant’ in areas like health, product research and travel planning. 

ChatGPT vs Perplexity vs Google: How do the three Deep Research agents fare?

According to its own admission, Perplexity falls behind ChatGPT Deep Research on accuracy rankings on Humanity’s Last Exam. Perplexity does claim that its latest AI offering beats the likes of Gemini Thinking, o3-Mini, Grok 2 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on the same bechmark. 

While Perplexity’s Deep Research might lack behind ChatGPT in accuracy, Srinivas claims in a post that the new AI tool is “an order of magnitude faster and cheaper” than the OpenAI offering. Notably, ChatGPT Deep Research provides only 100 queries to its Pro users compared to the 500 queries/day for paid users and limited queries for free users that Perplexity provides. 

Meanwhile, the focus on completing most tasks under 3 minutes is probably a way by Perplexity to undercut ChatGPT Deep Research which takes somewhere between 30 minutes to hours for completing a query. 

While Google was the first to launch a Deep Research tool based on Gemini 1.5 Pro, the tech giant has now fallen behind Perplexity and ChatGPT that are powered by more powerful AI models.