January 2025 Summaries

Perplexity has expanded access to its Sonar and Sonar Pro APIs, enabling developers to build generative search applications that use real-time web research, trusted sources, customizable domain filters, JSON output, and inline citations rather than relying solely on model training data. Sonar is positioned as a lightweight, fast, and affordable option for question-answering features, while Sonar Pro supports more complex multi-step research, longer contexts, nuanced follow-up questions, and roughly twice as many citations. Companies including Copy.ai, Doximity, and Zoom use the APIs for prospect research, medical information retrieval, and private live search within video calls. Perplexity reports that Sonar Pro achieved a 0.858 F-score and Sonar a 0.773 F-score on the SimpleQA factuality benchmark, attributing their performance to combining language-model summarization with current internet information.