Perplexity, a prominent AI company, has announced the release of its Deep Research tool, a feature designed to provide more in-depth answers with real citations for professional use cases. This move comes on the heels of similar announcements from Google and OpenAI, with all three companies giving their feature the same name: Deep Research.

The goal of Deep Research is to excel at expert-level tasks, such as finance, marketing, and product research, by providing detailed reports that can be exported as PDFs or shared as Perplexity Pages. To use the feature, users simply select "Deep Research" from a drop-down menu when submitting their query, and Perplexity's AI will create a comprehensive report.

Perplexity's Deep Research is currently available on the web, with plans to integrate it into the company's Mac, iOS, and Android apps soon. The feature is designed to "iteratively search, read documents, and reason about what to do next, refining its research plan as it learns more about the subject areas," similar to how a human might research a new topic.

In a benchmarking test, Perplexity's Deep Research scored 21.1% on Humanity's Last Exam, an AI benchmarking test with expert-level questions in various academic fields. While it didn't quite match OpenAI's Deep Research score of 26.6%, it outperformed other models such as Gemini Thinking (6.2%), Grok-2 (3.8%), and OpenAI's GPT-4o (3.3%).

One significant advantage of Perplexity's Deep Research is its accessibility. Unlike OpenAI's Deep Research, which requires a $200-per-month Pro subscription, Perplexity's feature is available for free, with non-subscribers getting an unspecified-but-limited number of queries per day and paying subscribers getting unlimited queries. Additionally, Perplexity's Deep Research seems to perform more quickly, completing most tasks in under three minutes compared to 5 to 30 minutes for OpenAI Deep Research.

When asked to compare the various deep research products, Perplexity highlighted the differences in technologies, pricing models, and performance in different use cases and subject matters. According to the company, Perplexity AI excels in speed and accessibility for casual researchers, OpenAI dominates in analytical depth for enterprise applications, and Google integrates most seamlessly with existing productivity ecosystems.

While it's too early to know how these tools will affect everyday and professional research as they become more popular, there are concerns about the potential limitations of relying on AI-powered research tools. As The Economist recently pointed out, there is a risk that "outsourcing all your research to a supergenius assistant" could "reduce the number of opportunities to have your best ideas."

As the AI-powered research landscape continues to evolve, it will be interesting to see how these tools impact the way we approach research and information gathering. With Perplexity's Deep Research joining the fray, the competition is heating up, and it's likely that we'll see further innovations and advancements in the coming months.