Perplexity’s Comet Browser Wants to Change How You Surf the Web

Chrome is undeniably the leader in terms of browser market share. There are many things to like about Chrome, such as its tight integration with Google services. But no king rules forever. During a recent interview with Alex Heath over at The Verge, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas spoke more about the company’s new AI browser, Comet.

Perplexity CEO shares more details on AI browser

For those unfamiliar, Perplexity recently launched a browser called Comet. This is an AI-powered browser that integrates Perplexity’s AI models into it, making the integration between the browser and AI tighter than ever. However, the downside is that Comet is invite-only.

Only those subscribed to the $200 a month Perplexity Max plan have access to it, while the rest of us will have to sit around and wait for an invite. This means there’s still a lot about the browser we don’t know. But during the interview with The Verge, the CEO of Perplexity shared additional details about its AI browser.

For starters, it was revealed that Comet is built on Chromium. This is an open-source version of Chrome maintained by Google. This means that if you’ve used Chrome, using Comet should be a familiar experience. According to Srinivas, they used Chromium because it’s already pretty good and the company saw no need to reinvent the wheel. Plus, it also makes hiring engineers easier.

Changing the way we use the internet

The interview also revealed one difference between Comet and Chromium. This comes in the form of a sidecar that overlays Perplexity’s AI on top of whatever you’re browsing. This includes the ability to ask the AI to perform tasks for you while you’re browsing.

Srinivas gave an example of how a user might be watching a video and wants to find a section about a specific topic and send that to teammates on Slack. “I think that’s the thing, you can just invoke the assistant on the site and do it instantly. It’s connected to your Gmail, your calendar. It’s also able to pull the transcript from the YouTube video. It has fine-grain access, and it’s immediately able to retrieve the relevant snippet. I can even ask it to play it from that exact timestamp instead of going through the entire transcript, like whatever I want. That is the level of advantage you have.”

That being said, Comet is still far from perfect. Srinivas acknowledges that there are some limitations on what Comet can do right now. However, he thinks that some of these limitations could be gone in 6 months to a year from now.

Perplexity won’t be alone in the AI space, though. A recent rumor suggests that OpenAI could be developing an AI-powered browser as well.