Perplexity acquired a small Seattle-based startup known as Carbon which makes a speciality of connecting AI techniques to exterior information sources, the businesses introduced on Wednesday. CEO Aravind Srinivasan says this may permit Perplexity to go looking by means of your recordsdata and work messages in Notion, Google Docs, Slack, and different enterprise purposes someday in early 2025.
Carbon makes a speciality of retrieval augmented era, or RAG, which permits giant language fashions to entry data from exterior databases earlier than it generates a solution. By bringing Carbon’s expertise and employees on board, Perplexity may very well be opening the door to launching enterprise search merchandise. These instruments join generative AI to enterprise databases, permitting staff to shortly search by means of the mass of unstructured information their corporations have acquired over time.
“Carbon will make it simpler for Perplexity’s reply engine to learn by various sources of knowledge, whether or not that information resides in inner databases, cloud storage, or doc repositories,” mentioned Perplexity in a press release.
Enterprise AI search is shortly changing into a aggressive house within the AI world. OpenAI reportedly advised buyers in its newest $6.6 billion spherical that they might not additionally put money into Glean, the present frontrunner in enterprise search. Glean has reportedly impressed OpenAI, Google, and a number of other different AI giants to develop their very own enterprise search merchandise — and maybe they’ve impressed Perplexity as nicely.
This is Perplexity’s second acquisition, following its 2023 acquisition of Spellwise, whose CEO was introduced on to develop Perplexity’s cellular app.
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