Re:Perplexity launches AI agents for work
by wmchen on Friday November 06, 2026 @02:18PM
(#50397003)
>I forgot Perplexity even still existed. They went from all the rage to nobody talks about them anymore.
A lot of the early hype was driven by how liberally they were handing out free Pro memberships. For a while, every telco, bank, etc. was handing it out as a free promotional offer. I don't think anyone I know that raved about it ever gave them a single dime.
Their product was definitely cool for a few months, but they had zero moat to begin with (considering how quickly the frontier labs caught up), and the conversion rate on those free sign-ups must have been abysmal, especially after they nerfed the free Pro subscriptions on both quality and quantity dimensions, and their own "politically neutral" DeepSeek R1 distillation didn't pan out.
A lot of the early hype was driven by how liberally they were handing out free Pro memberships. For a while, every telco, bank, etc. was handing it out as a free promotional offer. I don't think anyone I know that raved about it ever gave them a single dime.
Their product was definitely cool for a few months, but they had zero moat to begin with (considering how quickly the frontier labs caught up), and the conversion rate on those free sign-ups must have been abysmal, especially after they nerfed the free Pro subscriptions on both quality and quantity dimensions, and their own "politically neutral" DeepSeek R1 distillation didn't pan out.