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AI search start-up Perplexity has ramped up its competition with Google by releasing Comet, its new web browser, on Wednesday.
Built upon Perplexity's proprietary search engine, Comet is compatible with "all of your usual extensions, settings, and bookmarks," according to a Perplexity blog, meaning it's "a seamless switch" to make it your new default browser. It's initially being launched for Mac and Windows, with support on other platforms expected to arrive in the coming months.
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Perplexity CEO and cofounder Aravind Srivinas wrote on X Thursday morning that Comet would be available on Android devices soon.
"Comet reimagines the browser from the ground up," Perplexity wrote on its website. "It actively helps you ask, understand, and remember what you see. It connects the dots at lightning speed and assists with distracting tasks that steal your focus."
In the spirit of collaboration, Comet comes with its own AI agent, Comet Assistant, which is integrated directly into the browser and upon which users can offload a variety of simple and mundane tasks.
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You can ask the agent to go through your unread emails in the morning, pull out the messages from your coworkers, and provide a quick summary of each. That requires, of course, handing over your email data to Perplexity; the same goes for your personal calendar, notes app, or anything else you'd like Comet Assistant to be able to interact with and extract information from.
It's a good idea to review your workplace's AI policy, if it has one, or check with a superior before leaking any potentially sensitive information to Perplexity or any other chatbot.
Comet is currently available to subscribers of the company's $200-per-month premium service, Perplexity Max, and to a cohort of early users who were invited after joining a waitlist.
A new era of AI-powered search
Launched in 2022, Perplexity's search engine leverages a collection of large language models (LLMs) to respond to user queries with AI-generated summaries, links to sources, and suggestions for follow-up questions. The company has marketed itself as the next phase in the evolution of online search, with the long-term goal of usurping the dominant model, pioneered by Google, of responding to user queries with a list of relevant web links.
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At the same time, however, Google is building a new future of Search with its controversial AI Overviews and the more recently released AI Mode, which operates a lot like Perplexity. Meanwhile, executives at Apple, have reportedly floated the idea of buying the up-and-coming AI search start-up, potentially to improve Safari.
Even with the launch of its new web browser, which will compete with the likes of Google Chrome and Safari, Perplexity has a long way to go before it replaces Google as the default search engine for the majority of the population.
Google's model has been inimical to exploration and learning, according to Perplexity: "the web -- our greatest source of information -- was never designed to nurture curiosity; instead we've been asked to 'browse' it through a one-way lens," the company says on its website. The implication, of course, is that the company's new model of web search represents a collaboration between humans and AI, both actively engaging one another to ask deeper questions and discover new knowledge.
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Still, the online search industry's accelerating drift towards generative AI strongly suggests that the strength of Perplexity's position will only continue to grow over time.
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