AI startup Perplexity, on September 25, launched the ‘Perplexity Search API’, offering builders entry to the infrastructure that allows Perplexity’s providers and an index that covers “lots of of billions” of webpages, the corporate introduced.

“In the case of AI, context is king. It’s inadequate to function merely on the doc degree. Our indexing and retrieval infrastructure divides paperwork up into fine-grained models,” Perplexity mentioned in a weblog put up. 

“These sub-document models are individually surfaced and scored in opposition to the unique question parameters, permitting our API to return paperwork with probably the most related snippets already ranked,” the corporate mentioned in an announcement, indicating that this is able to result in much less preprocessing whereas enabling quicker integration. 

Pricing tiers vary from the light-weight Sonar API at $1 per million enter and output tokens to the Sonar Professional at $3 and $15 per million enter and output tokens, respectively. 

It additionally gives specialised choices, equivalent to Sonar Reasoning, Sonar Reasoning Professional and Sonar Deep Analysis, which add various prices for reasoning, citations and search queries relying on the workload complexity.

The corporate additionally said that the API leads the competitors when it comes to high quality and latency, whereas offering top-tier efficiency at a decrease price. 

In comparison with different APIs from Exa and Courageous, the corporate claims to ship higher efficiency and latency throughout industry-standard benchmarks equivalent to SimpleQA and BrowseComp, amongst others. 

Supply: Perplexity

In addition to, Perplexity additionally launched a Search SDK, which the corporate says its engineers have been ready to make use of together with AI coding instruments to “develop spectacular product prototypes in below an hour”.

“We anticipate much more spectacular feats from startups and solo builders, mature enterprises and everybody in between,” the corporate added. 

A couple of days in the past, a number of reviews indicated that Perplexity has “secured commitments” from traders for $200 million in new funding at a valuation of $20 billion. This marks a rise from its earlier reported valuation of $18 billion, after a fundraising spherical in July.