First look: Perplexity launches AI patent directory

• Perplexity Patents launches in beta on Thursday, and this version will be free.

What they're saying: Perplexity vice president of policy and global affairs Jerry Ma told Axios that the product will make searching for patents and prior inventions as easy as entering any question into its AI-powered search engine.

• Perplexity's AI agent will use "official documents straight from the government. That leads to a more trustworthy and richer experience," Ma said.
• "Most of the information about advances in technology really only exist in the patent domain, because that's where companies disclose the full details of how they built products and furthered innovation."

How it works: When a user asks Perplexity Patents a question, it will go beyond exact keywords and phrases to serve up all possible related answers to a patent-related query.

• It will search not just patent databases, but also academic papers and blogs.

• Perplexity will pull information about patents around the world from publicly available databases.
• The company wants to get feedback from initial users of the product to refine and improve it before it moves out of the beta version.

What's next: Perplexity will keep a free version for all users going forward and refine it with user feedback, per the company, and future Perplexity Pro members will have expanded access.

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