March 2025 Summaries

Perplexity outlines a proposal to acquire and redesign TikTok around transparent, U.S.-based infrastructure, arguing that its independent position could avoid continued ByteDance influence or consolidation by a major competitor. The company says it would rebuild TikTok’s personalized For You recommendation system, make its algorithm open source, operate it under U.S. oversight, and use Nvidia-powered AI infrastructure to improve recommendation speed and scale. It also proposes adding citations, community-feedback features, and contextual AI tools to videos to help users assess information, while combining TikTok’s video library with Perplexity’s answer engine to strengthen search and research capabilities. Additional plans include optional cross-platform personalization for linked accounts, automated translation and annotations for creators, and tools that would let viewers move from short videos into deeper research, with the stated goal of prioritizing informational value and user satisfaction alongside entertainment.

Perplexity announced updates to its Sonar, Sonar Pro, and Sonar Reasoning Pro models aimed at improving search performance, factual accuracy, pricing transparency, and user control over compute costs. The models now offer High, Medium, and Low search modes, except for Sonar Deep Research, allowing users to choose between maximum context for complex tasks, balanced performance, or lower-cost handling of straightforward queries; Low mode matches prior Sonar pricing. The company says benchmark tests show Sonar exceeding GPT-4o Mini’s factual accuracy and approaching GPT-4o High, while Sonar Pro reportedly surpasses higher-priced competitors, including search-enabled GPT-4o, at lower costs. Citation tokens will no longer be billed for Sonar Pro and Sonar Reasoning Pro responses in the new modes, although Sonar Deep Research remains excluded. Existing billing was scheduled to remain the default for 30 days while the modes were introduced as opt-in, followed by a shift to Low mode as default, and after April 18, 2025, certain citation and search-result usage fields would no longer be returned by the Pro APIs.

Perplexity has partnered with SoftBank Corp. to launch Enterprise Pro for corporate customers in Japan, making SoftBank its first authorized reseller and expanding Perplexity’s presence in the Japanese enterprise market. SoftBank tested the product internally for six months before offering it to clients and will use its established enterprise relationships across sectors such as finance, manufacturing, healthcare, and technology to support adoption. The agreement extends an existing consumer-focused alliance begun in June 2024, which provided eligible SoftBank, Y!Mobile, and LINEMO customers a one-year free Perplexity Pro trial. Enterprise Pro offers AI-powered search, Deep Research capabilities, access to web, premium, and internal data sources, and administrative security controls, while emphasizing privacy, seven-day query deletion, SSO, user management, and SOC 2 certification. Perplexity reports that more than 7,000 organizations, including NVIDIA, Databricks, Stripe, Zoom, and Snowflake, use Enterprise Pro for nearly 20 million daily queries, and describes the SoftBank deal as part of a broader global expansion following partnerships with SK Telecom in South Korea and Deutsche Telekom in Germany.