Perplexity's chief business officer Dmitry Shevelenko told the Financial Times that the Perplexity AI search engine answered about 250 million questions last month, compared with 500 million queries in all of 2023.

The new figures underscore Perplexity's status as one of the fastest-growing generative AI applications since OpenAI's ChatGPT launched in November 2022, despite controversy over the company's illegal cyber data collection.

Perplexity was founded by former Google intern Aravind Srinivas just three months before ChatGPT launched. It answers questions using AI software, as well as information scraped “in real time” from the web, including news sites.

Perplexity is now shifting its business model from subscriptions to advertising, competing more closely with Google — the giant that dominates the $300 billion search advertising industry.

Perplexity AI's development comes as Google pushes to integrate AI features into its core search product, while OpenAI launched SearchGPT, a prototype AI search engine available to about 10,000 testers.

To compete with larger rivals, Perplexity recently closed a new $250 million investment from investors including SoftBank’s Vision Fund 2, tripling the company’s valuation from $1 billion in April to $3 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

Shevelenko said Perplexity is undeterred by competition from better-resourced tech companies, including Microsoft-backed OpenAI, maker of the world's most popular AI chatbot.

“OpenAI is doing a lot of different things… They’re not focused on providing high-quality answers to user questions. That’s why SearchGPT’s responses are not as highly rated as Perplexity’s,” Shevelenko explained.

Perplexity's revenue comes primarily from consumer and business subscriptions, but the startup recently announced that it will introduce advertising on its platform later next month.

Shevelenko said the company will share a “double-digit” percentage of revenue for each sponsored article from the news outlets it sources. The company has signed deals with Time, Der Spiegel and Fortune, among others.

However, before announcing its recent partnerships with news publishers, Perplexity was accused of plagiarism in June by publications Forbes and Wired, which criticized the startup for copying articles without crediting the source.

Shevelenko acknowledged the allegations and said the company had taken the criticism to heart. Perplexity has since made changes to its user interface to make the cited sources more prominent.

Ngoc Anh (according to FT)