Perplexity Max Debuts Multi-AI Agent Tool

perplexity is jumping on the open claw bandwagon

or at least their own flavor of this.

They said that their premium subscribers

are gonna have access to a new agent tool

that can take 19 different AI models

all working together in computer use,

meaning it can kind of take control of your screen

and get jobs done for you.

Now, there's a whole bunch of interesting things

and features that they have added

that I think might give them a bit of a competitive advantage.

I'm gonna be breaking that down,

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All right, let's talk about what's going on with perplexity.

So what their highest tier gets access to

and perplexity's highest tier,

I believe is like $200 a month.

So you're not gonna get this if you're just a $20 a month user.

This is not a cheap use case,

but it's so it's their perplexity max plan

because it's also running entirely in the cloud.

They say that it can avoid a lot of security risks

that have happened to local device level agents

like OpenClaw and essentially this is in their own description

a tool that, quote, unifies every current AI capability

into a single system.

So basically this is a cloud-based computer using agent.

It can execute complex workflows independently.

It's orchestrating 19 different AI models

and it can even spin up what they are saying

are sub agents to tackle specific sub problems.

I think there's no hands-on demo

that they've provided to anyone yet,

but they've shown some examples of the workflows

on their website and basically they're showing

the system kind of going around.

It's gathering financial, legal, statistical data.

It's conducted a bunch of multi-step analysis.

It's presenting results as kind of a finished website

or a visualization.

I think the product was originally slated

for a live demo during a background media briefing

last week, but then they canceled the demo

after they identified some last minute flaws

in the software.

This is kind of brutal.

It really just shows how breakneck we are right now

with a lot of these software.

And to be fair, we've seen companies

that have not done that, like Google at Google IO last year.

I remember they were demoing their glasses,

this kind of new computer vision glasses

that was showing Google Maps live on your Google lens

in front of you and while they were demoing it,

it kind of crashed and stopped working.

So sometimes the software's not ready,

but they just want to get it out there

they're excited to show it off.

In this case, perplexity did pull back

and is waiting since I guess they don't have

like a huge event with thousands of people there

that they got a, wow, they can always show it in the future.

So this launch though that they're going to be rolling out

I think is the next step basically for perplexities,

evolution, perplexity is a company that kind of started out

doing what Google AI is doing today in Google search.

And that's where they got a lot of their initial user base.

And as Google kind of took over,

a lot of people were saying, oh, is perplexity dead

or they gone?

I don't think so.

I think they've created a ton of really cool products

and just the fact that on perplexity you get access,

kind of like AI box, if I'm being honest,

but you get access to all of the different AI models

in one chat interface,

I think gives them a great competitive advantage

to something like chat GPT or cloud

or perplexity or Gemini, et cetera.

Initially, they were kind of this search engine

like I mentioned, but they've pivoted

and done a lot of additional things.

So one of those is comma, it's an entire web browser.

They're kind of positioning themselves

as a new layer between users and the internet.

A lot of executives argued during a recent press briefing

that they did that competitors, including Google,

have since kind of reshaped their own products

in ways that resemble perplexes early design choices.

They say that this is kind of like, look,

this validates that we're on the right track.

But of course, I think to everyone,

we can see that this does give them

a lot of competitive pressure.

Perplexity also said that they're adjusting their business

model in response to kind of where the whole AI ecosystem's

going, one of the first AI startups

that was experimented with advertising.

They actually abandoned ads late last year.

They said that the model risk kind of undermining user trust

and answer accuracy, but that's interesting

because chat GPT is now about to jump into this

and they've reported that they have 900 million

weekly chat GPT users that are all gonna,

I mean, a lot of the free ones are gonna start

getting seen kind of these ads everywhere.

So it's interesting that perplexity already tried ads,

walked away from it, chat GPT is about to get into that.

I think rather than go and try to chase kind of maximum scale,

perplexity has said that they are targeting a narrower audience.

They said they're looking for professionals that are making

what they describe as a GDP moving decisions, right?

So they're like, look, we're not going for the whole world.

We're not trying to boil the ocean like open AI is,

we're just going for people making GDP moving decisions.

And if you see a lot of their branding,

you'll notice that they do a lot of work with highlighting news

or financial analysis.

I think during a recent briefing they did,

their executives really were kind of emphasizing

the enterprise subscriptions and a lot of the deep research

as some of their core priorities.

They kind of publicly downplay all of the monthly active users.

You they say, you know, this is not something

that we ever talk about.

We're not actually, this is a quote from them.

They said quote, we're not actually on a mission

to get as many users as possible.

Now, if they had an insane amount of monthly active users,

I'm sure they'd be touting it,

but it doesn't seem like it's maybe the strongest thing

about the company.

And so it feels like that's why they might not be sharing it

out so publicly.

I think they're trying to kind of reinforce their position

right now.

They said that they recently introduced a new benchmark

for some complex research tasks.

They're calling it Draco.

And they say that their deep research product

outperforms things like Gemini.

Proplexity also said that they have built

their own AI optimized search inject index,

which is basically reducing the reliance

on third party APIs.

I think kind of the core thing to Proplexity's strategy right now

is that they believe that the future is multimodal

rather than betting on a single LLM like Chat GPT

or cloud Proplexity is basically routing your question

across a bunch of different third party LLMs

and then they pick the best one for answering

that specific task.

They actually have a cool feature that I've recently seen,

which is like I think it's called like court or something

where you basically ask a question to the court

and it pitches the question to like all the top AI models,

they all give their response

and then it has them all deliberate

between each other what the best response is.

And then it gives you like based off of GROC, Gemini,

Chat GPT and THROPPIG, this is like the best response,

which I think is a pretty interesting,

you'd hate to ask a question that one particular model

doesn't have a good data set for, right?

Like we know that anthropic is the best for code

and opening AI might be the best for getting like real world

info and Google is the best for, you know,

things that need API integrations to a lot of data.

Like they all have these kind of different strengths

and sometimes I feel like I asked the wrong question

to Chat GPT, I get it too like a lot of creative writing

or something like that.

And I'm like, oh, I really should be asking Claude.

Anyways, Proplexes built a tool for this,

which I think is quite interesting.

So right now according to all of their executives,

the visual outputs in the late 2025

were most frequently handled by Gemini Flash software

engineering tasks were done by Claude Sonnet

and medical research was all given to GPT.

So this is kind of interesting, these different areas

that they're funneling different directions,

their system right now can automatically choose

what model based on cost and performance.

In some cases, Proplexed is running

some modified open source Chinese built LLMs

to answer different questions more cheaply.

Some people have criticized that in the past

because they weren't really clearly disclosing it.

But when they're usually running like open source stuff,

even if it's Chinese, it's not like they're sending

data back to Chinese servers typically unless they have an API.

If they're running it on their own cloud

and I think it's not really security risk,

a lot of their executives argue that

they're handling all this transparently.

They say that this type of orchestration

can significantly improve efficiency,

which to be honest, I think that they might be

onto something there.

You can also, I think they have a whole bunch of other products

that they're launching soon.

There's the comment browser that is slated

to arrive on iOS next month, which should be interesting.

And they're also planning on hosting

their first developer conference in March, I believe,

to kind of promote third party use of their API,

which I already have their API tied into AI box.

It kind of was a good way for us to get access

to AI plus the internet.

So it's something that's interesting for me.

Internally, they say that their focus

has kind of shifted from daily query counts

to revenue metrics.

I think that has not been something that their users

have not noticed.

I think there's some people that have been complaining

on different like on Reddit and stuff

about tighter rate limits on the free and paid tier.

A lot of people over at Proplexer right now

say that the free tier has not been degraded.

I think if you look at all of this though,

Proplexer computer, this new feature

that they're going to be rolling out here soon,

is basically showing they have a really big ambition.

They're trying to take on what Clawed Code

or OpenClaw is doing.

They're moving beyond just kind of being an AI search tool.

And I think that they actually made the first step

in this direction with Proplexer comment,

their browser, which was an AI agent browser

that could actually do tasks for you.

So I think this isn't like a new direction for them.

I think this is just them kind of following through.

And I will give Proplexity credit,

which is that it feels like they're faster

than a lot of the other frontier companies.

They beat OpenAI before OpenAI was able to release

their Atlas browser and before Chrome was able to kind of

do some of their features and even before Anthropic

was able to.

So if they're doing a great job,

this is a company I would definitely keep following

in the future.

Thanks so much for tuning into the podcast.

I will catch you guys all in the next episode.

Make sure to go check out AIbox.ai.

If you want to get access to all of these models,

including everything from Proplexity,

link is in the description.

It is $8.99 a month.