🧙🏼 Perplexity Shopping (woah)

Howdy, wizards.

Here’s what’s brewing in AI today.

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1. Perplexity now lets you buy products

Big news today from the Perplexity, the AI chatbot positioned as an “answer-engine” is taking things one step further by enabling shopping directly from its platform.

Here’s the details:

• You can now purchase products wit one click without leaving Perplexity, with free shipping included.

• Searching for products with Perplexity now researches and curates a comparison of alternatives in organized cards, including description, key features, pricing, summarised reviews and, importantly, a “Buy with Pro” button.

• Works with many different types of queries, e.g. “Find a coffee maker under $100”, “best 3d printers”, “converter for phone charger US to Europe”, and much more.

• “Snap to Shop” lets you take a picture of a product, and gives you more information about it, including where to buy.

• Products that are supported through Buy with Pro come with free shipping. Perplexity is also working with Shopify to bring their merchants on the platform with support for “Shop Pay” (payment solution) for those products. Other products which aren’t part of these schemes will redirect users to the merchant’s website.

Currently, the feature is only available for Pro members based in the US, but will be expanded internationally soon, according to Perplexity’s CEO.

Along with their AI-powered shopping feature, Perplexity is also introducing a Merchant Program to make it easier for businesses to bring their products right into Perplexity’s search results and allow shopping.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ The user interface of chatbots is becoming increasingly commoditised – they all look kinda similar to each other. Perplexity is doing something smart, focusing 100% on end-to-end UI and actions, including providing organized, real-time info on important industries (Sports, Finance, Elections++) and now, enabling easy transactions. It’s pretty wild that despite not really having a frontier level model of their own, Perplexity is coming for the other AI companies, Google, even Amazon. They’re also being strategic with partnerships, working with publishers, data providers and, most recently, Shopify.

When asked about whether Amazon is currently involved in some way, Perplexity’s CEO said that they’re not currently working together adding that “we’re happy to work with everyone and that includes Amazon too”.

To think how well positioned Google was to take literally all of this space just a year ago.. having distribution, advanced AI and a ton of money early on – but instead are now having their Gemini chatbot meme’d as the “Internet Explorer of AIs”.

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2. Mistral drops a new flagship model + chatbot with image generation, web search and document analysis

Mistral has released Pixtral Large, a 124B parameter open-weights multimodal model building on Mistral Large 2. It also powers their chatbot, le Chat, now features image generation (via Black Forest Labs’ Flux Pro), web search, and a canvas feature. Le Chat’s canvas allows you to edit documents in separate window, much like ChatGPT’s canvas does (albeit simpler).

The model boasts superior image understanding, reportedly outperforming Gemini 1.5 Pro and GPT-4 on chart and document analysis. With a 128K context window, that should let you effectively analyse large files (like a 300 page book).

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Mistral is different than the leading AI companies, it’s non-US based and its models are more open compared to OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. It’s great to see some more diversity coming to the model layer of LLMs, and also that it’s possible to launch good stuff out of Europe – which has been characterised by a stringent and at times ambiguous regulatory landscape when it comes AI.

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