Perplexity Pro Now Has R1, o3-mini, and Just About Everything Else
Sunday, February 2, 2025
I’ve used nearly all of the premium AI subscription services, but none of them come close to offering the value that Perplexity Pro does. Despite the company’s contentious relationship with publishers, I’ve continued to believe it is one of the best-positioned startups in the space. After the emergence of DeepSeek, my lack of usage of Sora or Operator, and realizing my primary use case is almost always search, I moved on from services offered directly by the LLM providers.
Perplexity is particularly appealing because of how quickly the company moves to integrate new models and features. I was floored by how quickly they had DeepSeek R1 up and running both on-site and in their apps. No one capitalized better on the DeepSeek moment in the US than they did. Fortunately, this wasn’t a one-off. When OpenAI surprised us all with o3-mini on Friday, I was anxious to play with it. Of course, I could do so because my ChatGPT subscription was still active. But it took a day for Perplexity to have o3-mini integrated into their reasoning system right alongside DeepSeek R1. That means that Perplexity now has every major model (sans Llama, though that might be a benefit given how it’s inescapable inside of Meta apps already) built-in to their Pro subscription. Users get 500 reasoning queries a day using R1 and o3-mini, safely hosted in the US, coupled with the best web search offering there is.
That would be enough, but recall that Perplexity Pro already had several advanced models built-in. Your subscription gets you access to Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT 4o, and Grok 2. Plus, you get access to Perplexity’s own models. Instead of having to subscribe to Claude or ChatGPT, you can get them both in a single subscription. And it precludes you from having to use the official Grok or DeepSeek solutions. Again, all of this would be enough if you didn’t also get Playground v3, DALL_E 3, and FLUX.1 for image generation. It’s a mind-blowing amount of value for a single $20/month subscription, which would otherwise cost you the same to subscribe to just one of some of these.
Perplexity ties it all up and adds a nice little bow on top. The UI of the app and the website are great and continue to get better. They keep adding data widgets, switching to a writing or math focus is easy as can be, and you can even build out dedicated pages for topics and edit them as you wish. It’s a ridiculously good offering and if you have an Android device, the assistant just makes it all that much better. I can’t recommend it enough. If you haven’t used Perplexity, try the free version and I think you’ll immediately be blown away by how good it is as a search engine. But if you want to get more out of these tools, it’s well worth trying the Pro subscription.
(Perplexity now has Gemini too as of 2/5!)