Perplexity Introduces Free Deep Research Feature To Rival OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, & xAI

In the ever-evolving world of artificial intelligence (AI) and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), there is not one minute any AI company or startup spares to upgrade its offerings (that aligns with the definition of “ever-evolving”).

Nor do they waste time in announcing their new and shiny upgrades, especially not when they outshine their competitors’ products. Remember DeepSeek’s industry-shaking revelation?

This is what Perplexity AI, a free AI-powered answer engine that provides accurate, trusted, and real-time answers to any question (according to its website), looked to achieve through its latest reveal.

Through a blog post published on its website, Perplexity introduced its new Deep Research feature.

The feature aims to help users save hours by having the tool conduct in-depth research and analysis on their behalf.

When users ask Perplexity’s Deep Research a question, the tool “performs dozens of searches, reads hundreds of sources, and reasons through the material to autonomously deliver a comprehensive report.”

Perplexity Deep Research can be used across a wide range of categories, spanning finance, marketing, technology, current affairs, health, biography, travel, and more.

Deep Research is available to all for free, but only pro subscribers will get unlimited Deep Research queries, while non-subscribers will be restricted to a limited number of answers per day. The new feature is available on Web now. However, it will soon be rolling out to iOS, Android, and Mac.


Furthermore, Perplexity’s Deep Research outscores Gemini Thinking, o3-mini, o1, DeepSeek-R1, and many other leading models on Humanity’s Last Exam—a comprehensive benchmark that consists of over 3,000 questions across 100+ subjects and is used to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs—hitting a 21.1% accuracy score.

On the SimpleQA benchmark, which includes several thousand questions to test the model for factuality, Perplexity outperformed numerous leading models by scoring 93.9% accuracy.

Other than attaining high scores on industry benchmarks, Deep Research on Perplexity also completes most research tasks in under 3 minutes—which the startup is working on making faster in the future.


Soon after Perplexity’s unveiling, the Elon Musk-led xAI made an announcement of its own—the availability of Grok 3.

However, Musk has been teasing the launch of Grok 3 all week and even revealed that it would be released on Monday. Initial access to this powerful model will be made available exclusively to Premium Plus subscribers on the X platform through a new subscription model, “Super Grok.”

Grok 3 is a family of models that will also come with voice interactions, making the platform more intuitive and natural. A smaller version of Grok 3 is also available, in addition to Grok 3 mini.

Early reviews of Grok 3 are positive, with users such as American computer scientist Lex Fridman saying, “I got to use Grok 3 extensively (early). My mind is blown, very impressive model. Congrats to Elon and the team for bringing it to life.”

Grok 3 is also said to outperform competitors such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s DeepMind Gemini in complex reasoning tasks. However, these claims are based on internal metrics rather than independent evaluations.

However, not all features and models of the Grok 3 family are available yet, as some of them are in beta. Nevertheless, Grok 3’s rollout has begun and is ready to challenge Perplexity, OpenAI, Google, and others in the GenAI market.

Do you think Perplexity’s deep research feature will help it compete with industry giants OpenAI, Google, DeepSeek, xAI, Anthropic, and others?

Let us know in the comments below!