Perplexity Teams Up with Vercel: Unlocking AI Search for Developer Applications

Perplexity AI is intensifying its efforts to expand its influence in the competitive AI landscape. Based in California, the startup aims to rival giants like Google and Microsoft through its innovative AI search and native discovery engine. Recently, Perplexity announced a partnership with web development platform Vercel.

This collaboration enables developers using Vercel to seamlessly integrate Perplexity's powerful large language models (LLMs) into their applications, serving as an advanced knowledge support system.

Perplexity's integration with Vercel represents a strategic move to amplify its presence in the AI sector and position itself as a leader in knowledge discovery. The company has previously engaged with various AI hardware manufacturers to showcase its technology prominently within their products. Notably, Perplexity is not alone in this initiative; AI voice company ElevenLabs and several other startups are also forming partnerships with Vercel.

How Will the Perplexity Integration Work?

Previously known as ZEIT, Vercel is a cloud platform that assists developers in building, deploying, and hosting web applications, including AI-centric solutions like recommendation systems, customer service chatbots, and generative services.

To facilitate these applications, Vercel offers an AI SDK—an open-source library allowing developers to create conversational streaming interfaces in JavaScript and TypeScript while incorporating the model of their choice. This is complemented by a generative UI platform to realize the final vision.

While the SDK already supports models from established companies like OpenAI and Mistral, Vercel's collaboration with Perplexity adds even more options for developers. By accessing Perplexity's APIs—pplx-7b-online and pplx-70b-online—developers can utilize its online LLMs.

These online LLMs stand out by drawing on real-time information from the internet with no cut-off dates. This capability makes them ideal for time-sensitive applications, such as delivering updates on sports scores.

Perplexity emphasizes its powerful search, indexing, and crawling infrastructure that enhances LLM responses with real-time, relevant information. "Our search index is vast, regularly updated, and employs sophisticated ranking algorithms to prioritize high-quality, non-SEOed sites. We provide website excerpts, known as 'snippets,' to our pplx-online models, ensuring responses are as current as possible," states the company in their blog.

Expanding Knowledge Discovery

This is not Perplexity's first initiative to advance its knowledge discovery AI capabilities. The company has recently partnered with Brilliant Labs to facilitate real-time queries through AI-enhanced glasses, allowing users to ask questions about their environment. Earlier this January, Perplexity collaborated with Arc to establish itself as the default search engine for their browser and initiated a partnership with Rabbit to incorporate Perplexity as a key LLM service.

Other AI Integrations on Vercel

In addition to Perplexity, Vercel announced integrations with models from several other companies, including ElevenLabs, Modal, Replicate, Anyscale, Fal, Together AI, and LMNT.

"This SDK functions like an ORM for any AI model you wish to integrate, be it for text, images, or soon audio," Vercel highlighted in a recent blog post.

Alongside these new models, Vercel is set to launch an AI playground, allowing developers to experiment with various models and evaluate their responses—whether text, images, or audio—directly from the dashboard, empowering them to select the best fit for their targeted applications.