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- [00:00]
A
One of our favorite tools for helping people with their side hustles make money online is Perplexity AI. This is a very big company, I would say probably like when you talk about the top AI companies, it's top 20 for sure. Maybe top, probably top 10 if you look at. It's hard to say because there's so many big companies like Apple, Google, Amazon that all have stuff and they've spent billions of dollars on them. So it's hard to be compete with those that are in the kind of the top 10. But like so startups that actually came into this space, Perplexity is definitely the top 10 startups. Like it's, it's way, it's way up there with chat, GPT and anthropic. And they have just dropped a massive new update which is essentially creating a new tier, a $200 a month tier. So today on the podcast we're going to break down what exactly you get with this $200 a month tier. If it's worth it, if Jamie and I will be getting it. Some of the features that we think are particularly interesting for online side Hustles, what we might be using it for, what we've used Perplexing for in the past, all of that good stuff. But before we do, I wanted to mention that if you've ever wanted to grow and scale your own business using AI tools, we'd love to have you as a member of the AI Hustle school community. This is something Jamie and I do every single week. We essentially talk about how we're using AI to make money online, different side hustles that we're doing, and how we're using AI to grow and scale our businesses and careers. This week we did a whole deep dive on something called the Amazon Influencer program. And it's essentially a way that you can get, you get paid a commission if you generally, if you make videos about any sort of product in your house. And we talked a whole bunch about how you can actually get free stuff. Jamie got a free couch. There was $1,000 from this. So there's a whole bunch of really interesting things there. We break down a whole video if that's interesting to you. If not, we have over 50 videos talking about different tools we use for online marketing to grow and scale businesses and, and a ton of other interesting stuff. It's $19 a month and the link is in the description. We'd love to have you as a member of the AI Hustle school community. All right, Jamie, tell me what was most Interesting to you about Perplexity and their new $200 a month subscription plan. Is it too expensive or is it worth the money?
- [02:10]
B
Yeah, I mean I, you know that first, you know when you read that $200 price point that kind of makes you like choke a little bit. It seems super expensive. You know, what value could they possibly add that would be worth it? But I really, I'm going to read off some of the different features and I really think there is a lot of potential here and I'm going to talk about why in a minute. But they're offering access to their spreadsheet and report generation tool Labs, which is also like kind of along the similar. I think maybe that is what Labs is. And then they also have a new AI powered browser that they're releasing which I'm super excited about, called, it's called Comet. And they're also going to give give you priority access to services using their latest models such as OpenAI's O3 Pro and Claude Opus 4. So they're kind of including a lot. But I think, you know, that first one to me being able to generate spreadsheets and reports, I think Perplexity could really knock it out of the park with, I feel like, you know, sometimes I'll have chatgpt make me a spreadsheet and it's not like fully functional or not really like that good even, even still, you know, they're not. But Perplexity I feel like has always had really great graphics, really great research and you know, on in the, you know, up to date statistics and things like that. So I feel like they could really lean into this and actually have a really powerful report generation tool. So I'm pretty excited about that. But what do you, what are you reading about here, Jin?
- [03:41]
A
Okay, sorry, I'm like, let's get into those because I think those tools are probably actually the big headline here. But just the thread I want to pull on for a second that I do think is really interesting is their new browser. So they haven't explicitly like said what it is. They have a wait list if you go to perplexity, AI/comment it says a browser for agentic search by Perplexity. And something that was interesting that they said, one of their spokespeople said, quote, just like Perplexity reinvented search. We're also reinventing the browser. Something that I think is interesting here. Well, so first off, well that's very interesting. Intriguing to see what an actual browser would look like. I think that the, the, the thing that's interesting is they really did reinvent search. Like they forced Google to completely change the way they did search. If you look at what Google's doing with, you know, AI search today, it's largely a response to Perplexity. Like you could say it's a response to chat gbt. That's probably like a portion of it. But honestly, like, Perplexity is the one that I think is really crushing. And Perplexity has a competitive advantage that Google can't really compete with. That's pretty tricky. And that is the fact that Perplexity allows you to access all of the AI models on their platform to power your search. So like Google, They've got Gemini 2.5 Pro, which right now is actually great. I think it's one of the top of the line AI models. It just came out, it's one of the newest. So yes, it's the best. Or, or one of the best. It's on par with the best. But if OpenAI comes out with a killer model, or Great Grok comes out with a killer model from xai, or Anthropic comes out with a killer model, that beats it. Maybe Google's like scrambling to try to catch up for a month or two. Do you really want to use like the second best model for a couple months while you're waiting for Google to get around and try to make their search a little bit better? I think Perplexity has a really big competitive advantage in the fact that you can switch between models. It's kind of like what I'm doing with my startup AI Box AI where I let you chat with, you know, over 40 different models. You could switch them out. There's new models all the time. Different models are better than others. And it's the same kind of concept. We're not really like a search engine, but like perplexity is. We're more for like what you'd use chat GPT for tasks and, and kind of building documents and workflows and stuff. And we do audio and video or, sorry, audio and image and stuff, all kind of in the same chat, but it's the same concept. And I think that this is a competitive advantage. So when it comes to building an actual browser, I think Perplexity, if they, you know, come up with something incredible new and creative, I think they can get a lot of market share. But I also would expect Google, Chrome and probably Microsoft and everyone else that has a browser already to copy them. If they have a great idea, which I'm. I think they probably do. So is this new browser good enough to spend 200amonth? On the only precedent that I see in the AI industry right now that is charging $200 a month. There's two things. Number one is Google's VO video generator that's like, you know, it's obviously super expensive to generate videos. And number two is ChatGPT's operator, Anthropic has kind of a version of that, and Google has sort of a version of that. But really, I feel like if they're charging 200amonth, they better be doing something like ChatGPT operator, where it's completely doing something now. That's where. That's where I think they're probably going with this new browser, with their comment browser. It's probably going to be a lot like ChatGPT operator, where I actually can complete tasks for you. It says a browser for agentic search. So you would assume agentic search means actually accomplishing things for you. And if that's the case, it's probably worth 200 if it's as good as ChatGPT operator.
- [07:08]
B
No, that's. That's a great point. Yeah. If it can include some of those. Yeah, Agentic features, like you said, where it's. It's doing stuff for you. I think, you know, I think this is really going to be something that companies use. If you think of, you know, is this similar to what Chat GPT is doing with their operator? It's going to, it's going to replace employees eventually, you know, and that's an unfortunate, you know, consequence of all this. But I feel like with the spreadsheets and reports, this could be kind of their lane that they're using as well. Like, you know, creating a company's profit and loss sheet and graphs at the end of the year showing like, here's where our money's going. And being able to do all that with AI, even on a, you know, weekly or daily basis, is really powerful and, and could replace like an entire position, really, at a company. So I feel like that if it's good, which I'm assuming it is, the spreadsheet and report generation tool will be really powerful for corporations.
- [08:06]
A
Yeah. So I think it's going to be good. That whole thing that they have is called Perplexity Labs. They do a bunch of really cool things in there. I think it's them trying to differentiate themselves and build like an interesting new tool. Kind of like how Chat GPT has their GPTs, they have their canvas that can open up when you're talking and it's building a document like. So all of these AI models beyond just a powerful LLM are trying to create like software around it. This is where Perplexity has excelled because they've traditionally leaned on other LLMs. And so, yeah, I think this is going to be interesting. Is it worth $200 a month? I don't know if it is today. Like, I don't think I would pay 200 today personally for this. Because if you go to like their payment page and you go to their, you know, their $200 or they're like their payments, they have a $20 a month plan which is, it says 10 times as many citations in the answers. Okay, that's great, right? So like versus a free Perplexity thing. It has all these citations. So it's pretty much fact checking everything, linking it back to sources, which is really good. You get the Perplexity Labs, which is good. It's kind of like their Deep Research and it builds powerful documents and reports and stuff like that. Also Perplexity research. So I guess that's more like their Deep Research. Unlimited file and video uploads or. Sorry, and photo uploads. This is kind of interesting because obviously that all costs a lot of money. They got to store that extended access to image generation. They're, you know, they have APIs to some of these image generators and then, you know, everything else that you kind of expect. So that's the $20 a month and I think that's got a lot of value to it. I think, you know, if you're, if you're interested in using a lot of AI models for search and stuff, definitely pay $20 a month for perplexity. Then on their $200 model they say early access to comment, the agent browser. If it's just like Google Chrome, like, like whatever, like why would I want early access to this? But if it's ChatGPT operator. Yes, but when it says early access, I don't know if that means that you get it today or if it's coming like early access whenever it comes out. So I would clarify that. And then unlimited access to Perplexity Labs. Again, you're already getting this for the $20 a month. I don't know how much more unlimited gets you or how crazy people get with that. And then you can use the advanced models like O3 Pro Opus, you know, four or whatever. So like those are useful, but you could also just go pay $20 a month on Claude or OpenAI and get access to those. So I don't know if I pay the 200 for those. You know what I mean? It's kind of hard to upsell something that costs $20 somewhere else for 200, so. So I think their big play here is their browser, and I think it's going to be a chat, a ChatGPT operator competitor. But until it's like fully launched, I'm watching YouTube videos about how good it is. I personally want to pay the $200.
- [10:55]
B
So do you think right now it's kind of more just like fanboys who love Perplexity who are going to be signing up for it, or do you think people actually use the features enough to make it worth 200?
- [11:07]
A
I don't know. Who is the. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. If you really. If you're a power user of Per. Of Perplexity, then you'll sign up. They're not going to get a lot of signups until the, until their browser actually launches and people find out if it's actually good or not. If it is good, this thing will fly like hotcakes. Because if it's like, if it's a, if it's a agent browser that's really, really valuable, you can get a ton of work done. You can make money with it. It's like very easy to, to justify that until it launches. I think not a lot of people probably sign up for it totally.
- [11:38]
B
But anyway, so Perplexity up until this point generated $34 million in revenue in 2024. That's largely driven by their pro plan. So that's, that's a pretty decent chunk of change. But they still burned 65 million in cash, it says. So they're still operating at a loss. So, you know, maybe this is a, an attempt of them to kind of boost some of that revenue. Not really sure. But I still, I still am optimistic about, about what they have, and I'm excited to see what the Comet browser has. Has to offer.
- [12:13]
A
Yeah, same, same. Very, very excited. I'm. I'm pumped about anyone pushing forward the new features and exciting stuff in AI. Hey, guys, listen, if you enjoyed the podcast today and if you learned anything new about Perplexity or what's going on in the world of AI. Hopefully we saved you $200. If you're about to go out and buy this thing, um, or maybe you already bought it and you think it's worth it and you think we're crazy. So, I don't know. You tell us in the. Drop us a review. That's where we love to hear from you over on Apple or on Spotify if you guys could leave us a review. It really helps out the podcast grow. Make sure to join the AI Hustle School community. Drop any questions thoughts you have over there as well. We'd love to respond to you. There's a link to that in the description. Thanks so much and we will catch you guys next time.