Perplexity now displays results for temperature, currency conversion and simple math, so you don’t have to use Google

Amid ongoing controversy about dealing with of media articles and unique reporting, AI-powered search startup Perplexity now shows outcomes for factual queries similar to climate and time at a spot, foreign money conversion, and solutions to basic math queries straight by way of playing cards. It is a transfer to cease Perplexity customers from going to different engines like google like Google for such outcomes.

To be clear, Perplexity might already fetch this knowledge from the online and show ends in a descriptive means, however the firm is including some visible aptitude to those outcomes to make them extra distinguished and fast. On X, CEO Aravind Srinivas stated that these primary queries now ought to work quick on the search engine.

Notably, Srinivas stated final 12 months that Google handles primary queries like climate, time and reside sports activities scores effectively, and his firm had a variety of work to do. Whereas Google shows a variety of card-based information, together with sports activities match tables and primary film info, Perplexity additionally strikes within the route of displaying direct outcomes as an alternative of fetching from different sources.

For these new search outcomes, similar to climate information and foreign money conversions, Perplexity doesn’t hyperlink to any sources. Final month, Srinivas talked about that the search startup was working with an organization referred to as Tako, an AI search engine for visualizing info, to show info similar to inventory costs.

Perplexity confronted criticism from the media earlier this month, when Forbes government editor John Paczkowski identified that the search engine confirmed Forbes’ unique, paywalled reporting about ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s drone firm in search outcomes with out correct attribution and with close to an identical writing language in Perplexity’s just lately launched Pages function. Forbes stated that its reporting was additionally talked about prominently in Perplexity’s AI-generated podcast.

The argument from varied critics is that with out correct credit and getting sufficient link-back site visitors in return, AI-powered engines like google producing (or re-generating) media content material will eat up publications’ enterprise.

Final week, the Amazon-backed startup’s chief enterprise officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, informed Semafor that the corporate was already exploring revenue-sharing offers with publications. He stated that these offers would enable the publishers to earn recurring earnings.