What the business is
Perplexity is an AI answer engine now selling premium agentic tools and enterprise research on subscriptions.
How it started
Perplexity made its name wrapping frontier models in a familiar search-engine interface, then launched the Comet browser in the summer before. Perplexity Computer, available only on the top Max tier, 'unifies every current AI capability into a single system' — a cloud-running user agent that creates subagents for specific problems.
What happened
Executives argue 'multi-model is the future', citing users' switching patterns — December 2025 queries for visual outputs went mostly to Gemini Flash, coding to Claude Sonnet 4.5, medical research to GPT-5.1 — and offering a Model Council feature to query several models at once. The company built its own search index and the Draco benchmark for complex research. A planned press demo of Computer was cancelled hours before after flaws were found.
What has to be true
Routing queries to the best or cheapest model per task is a moat independent of any single model's fortunes.
Cloud-only execution dodges the security worries that haunt locally-running agent tools.
No frontier-training bills plus claimed high subscription margins let a mid-size player stay in the race.
What can be applied
When your format gets copied by giants, sell the orchestration layer: the company that packages everyone's models owns the switching.
Aftermath
Comet was due on iOS the following month and an Ask developer conference on 11 March in San Francisco was set to push third-party API use; complaints about new free-tier rate limits drew denials from executives.
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