‘Perplexity AI Can Help You Make Millions, or Even Billions of Dollars’ 

Perplexity AI, one of the leading GenAI startups, is unleashing a host of new services to its paid enterprise customers that can enable them to make informed financial decisions. These include a knowledge search platform, a financial information tool, and a data repository. 

Its ‘Internal Knowledge Search,’ allows enterprises to search the organisation’s files and the web simultaneously with a single search. 

“We want Perplexity to be the central knowledge base and research platform for everybody,” Aravind Srinivas, founder of Perplexity AI, said in an interview with a media house. He added that it would help users with research inputs, including due diligence, documents and proprietary information. 

The company believes that one of the primary use cases of this feature is to help financial services firms conduct more robust due diligence by tapping into internal research, call notes, and the latest industry news. 

Recently, Perplexity AI introduced Perplexity for Finance, which provides real-time stock quotes, historical earnings reports, industry peer comparisons, and detailed company financial analysis—all with a delightful UI. “These decisions are worth several millions or even billions of dollars. So, it’s worth using a tool to give you more clarity,” said Srinivas. 

Perplexity AI will soon add third-party proprietary data integrations with Crunchbase and FactSet for Enterprise Pro customers with active subscription subscriptions. “We’ll also do the same for verticals outside finance, such as legal and health,” said Srinivas.

“With this kind of data integration, Perplexity can become the default go-to place for capital market research and perhaps disrupt online sites/forums. It could potentially influence share prices by what’s written on it!,” posted a user on X.

The New Financial Analyst?

With the new financial analysis feature, Perplexity AI can help fintech companies and banks, which are currently built in-house, as they are wary of their data being leaked. 

Today, people count on a variety of services like Bloomberg Terminal, Stockopedia, Refinitiv Eikon, Yahoo Finance, Fidelity Investments, Robinhood, Zerodha, and Groww. Nevertheless, these companies have struggled to make the most of generative AI.

“Wait until they ingest all the reports and filings. This is the next generation of Google Finance or Yahoo Finance. A smart bank, wealth or securities business would be partnering with Perplexity AI to build this into their platform/app,” posted a user on X. 

Michael J. Miraflor, an independent consultant at Third City, likened the tool to a Bloomberg Terminal for everyday users, saying, “Is this… Bloomberg Terminal Lite for normies? (I know that’s not what this is trying to be, but there are several examples of AI information aggregators moving in that direction.)”

Similar to Perplexity’s product, other leading financial institutions are also building GenAI products to provide better services.  

For instance, JPMorgan recently announced the launch of a generative AI tool for its employees – an in-house version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT that can effectively perform tasks typically performed by research analysts.

Named the LLM Suite, the new large language model platform will be available to employees in JPMorgan’s asset and wealth management division. It uses third-party models to support tasks like writing, idea generation, and document summarisation.

Earlier this year, JPMorgan began rolling out the LLM Suite to select areas within the bank, reaching approximately 50,000 employees, or about 15% of its workforce. 

One of JPMorgan’s standout offerings is Quest IndexGPT, a tool powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 model for thematic investing. IndexGPT analyses news articles and generates keyword-driven investment themes, facilitating clients’ more informed decision-making.

Bloomberg recently introduced BloombergGPT, a model trained on over 50 billion parameters. It assists users in interpreting financial documents, reports, and invoices.

A potential threat to Perplexity for Finance could be OpenAI’s upcoming SearchGPT, though it has yet to be released.

Recently, researchers at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business published a paper which said that OpenAI’s GPT-4 can perform as well as or even better than human experts in financial statement interpretations. 

Using a method called chain-of-thought, the researchers trained GPT-4 to simulate the mental processes of a human financial analyst. This allowed it to analyse and forecast future market movements.

The team taught the model to produce precise predictions by recognising patterns, calculating ratios, and synthesising data. The study claimed that GPT-4 could forecast future profit direction with 60% accuracy, outperforming the majority of human financial analysts, who had an average of 53% and 57% accuracy.

Google is Not a Threat 

Srinivas is least worried about Google today. “Every single query on Perplexity, on average, has 10 to 11 words. Every query on Google has about two to three words, so users have much higher intent with each query, allowing them to ask more targeted questions,” he said.

In addition, Perplexity AI has introduced a new feature called Spaces. Users can now upload and store files, making it easier to manage and access essential documents. In addition to searching the web, Spaces enables users to search through their uploaded files, streamlining information retrieval. 

Another exciting feature is the ability to select an AI model of choice, giving users flexibility in their tasks. Moreover, users can write custom instructions to receive customised answers that better meet their specific needs.

Earlier this year, Google introduced AI Overviews, but it hasn’t received a strong response. Unlike AI Overviews, which have difficulty with complex, multi-layered questions, Perplexity’s results effectively handle multiple queries simultaneously, delivering accurate answers and relevant links. 

Moreover, Google’s AI Overviews recently also came under fire for suggesting users should use glue to stick cheese to their pizza, based on a comment from an 11-year-old Reddit user.