We all knew it was only a matter of time before agentic AI hit the mobile web browser. I've tested agentic AI on the desktop and, quite honestly, I've not been all that impressed. Why? Because doing things on a desktop is really easy for me. However, doing things on a mobile device is not quite so efficient. First of all, my mobile typing skills would be laughed at by Gen Z.
Patents are notoriously difficult to search for, but Perplexity has launched an AI-powered tool that's supposed to make the process a little easier. Its new patent research agent allows you to search for patents using natural language, rather than a string of keywords. As an example, Perplexity says you can enter something like, "Are there any patents on AI language learning?" or "Key quantum computing patents since 2024," and Perplexity will return relevant results, along with AI-generated summaries of each one.
While AI companies, startups, and others are rolling out their own web browsers that embed AI services deep into the web surfing experience, Mozilla's Firefox is instead allowing its customers to swap out their default search engine for an AI-powered search option in the browser they already use. The company on Tuesday announced that it's bringing AI answer engine Perplexity to Firefox, letting customers decide whether they want to use AI to search the web and find new information.
Perplexity is different from Google It's not just a search bar, it's a knowledge engine When you search for something on Google, you're usually greeted with a page full of search results and often an AI overview. From this point onwards, it falls on you to decide which results are worth your time and contain the information you need. Google usually does a pretty good job of ranking the right pages higher up,
Perplexity's Comet AI browser is meant to act as an AI assistant that works alongside you every step of your browsing experience, even taking actions for you, such as managing your accounts. This makes keeping your credentials secure more important than ever, and Perplexity's new partnership with 1Password aims to do just that. Instantly log in to your saved accounts On Wednesday, the two companies announced their partnership, which integrates 1Password directly into Comet.
Quick recap: Perplexity announced a new kind of subscription called Comet Plus. Users can pay $5 a month to access content from Perplexity's publisher partners-that is, those who sign up to participate-and Perplexity passes on most of the revenue to them. It's already set aside $42.5 million to kick-start the program, according to CEO Aravind Srinivas. Although the program is named after the company's new Comet web browser, users can use any browser to access the content via Perplexity.
Unlike the lump-sum AI training and content licensing deals favored by Amazon, Meta and OpenAI, it's building revenue share models that incentivize it to continue compensating publishers. But there are some major hurdles. In theory, the revenue share model around Perplexity's Comet Plus subscription tier announced this week sounds pretty good: publishers are paid based on how often their content is visited by humans and crawled by bots on its AI-powered browser Comet.
