🤓Perplexity Unveils Deep Research Challenger

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• Perplexity’s Deep Research tool—The tool rivals Google and OpenAI by offering fast, free, expert-level research capabilities.

• Meta showcases thought-to-action AI—Meta’s AI translates brainwaves into text with up to 80% accuracy using a specialized scanner

• In other AI news today—Meta is working on AI for humanoid robots, Grok 3 is launching with a live demo on Monday, the New York Times adopts AI tools in its newsroom, OpenAI’s board rejects Musk’s buy offer

• Saved the best for last—8 must-try AI tools

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Perplexity introduces Deep Research tool to challenge Google and OpenAI

Key Points 

• Perplexity’s Deep Research tool handles expert-level tasks like finance and marketing, offering faster results than competitors.

• The tool generates detailed reports that can be exported as PDFs or shared as Perplexity Pages.

• Unlike OpenAI, Perplexity offers free access to Deep Research, with non-subscribers allowed limited daily queries.

♨️News – Perplexity is the latest AI company to launch an advanced research tool, unveiling its own version of Deep Research on Friday. That makes it the third major AI company—after Google and OpenAI—to introduce such a feature in recent months.

According to Perplexity, its version of Deep Research is designed to handle expert-level tasks across fields like finance, marketing, and product research.

👨‍💻Here’s how it works – Perplexity’s Deep Research is currently available on the web, with plans to expand to Mac, iOS, and Android soon. Using it is straightforward—just select “Deep Research” from a drop-down menu when submitting a query. The tool then generates a detailed report, which can be exported as a PDF or shared as a Perplexity Page.

Perplexity says the tool continuously searches, analyzes documents, and refines its research strategy as it gathers more information—similar to how a human researcher would approach a topic.

🕵️‍♂️Any standouts? Perplexity highlighted the tool’s strong performance on Humanity’s Last Exam, an AI benchmark for expert-level reasoning. It scored 21.1%, significantly outperforming models like Gemini Thinking (6.2%), Grok-2 (3.8%), and GPT-4o (3.3%). But, it fell short of OpenAI’s Deep Research, which scored 26.6%.

However, while OpenAI’s Deep Research requires a $200-per-month Pro subscription, Perplexity’s version is free to use (though non-subscribers have a limited number of queries per day). It’s also faster, typically delivering results in under three minutes, compared to OpenAI’s 5 to 30 minutes.

Read the full story here. 

Meta’s thought-to-action AI can translate brainwaves into text

Key Points 

• Meta’s AI can predict letters based on brain activity with up to 80% accuracy, using an MEG scanner to capture brainwave signals while volunteers type.

• While promising, the technology remains impractical due to the large, costly equipment and specialized setup required.

👨🏻‍🔬News - Meta has shown off a thought-to-action AI capable of turning brain activity into words typed on a screen. 

The system, developed by Meta’s AI and neuroscience teams, analyzes brain activity to determine which keys a person is pressing based purely on their thoughts. No implanted electrodes or sci-fi headbands—just a deep neural network that reads brainwaves from the outside.

🤔How? In the research, volunteers sit inside a magnetoencephalography (MEG) scanner, which picks up magnetic signals from neurons firing in the brain. The AI model, Brain2Qwerty, uses these signals to predict the letters being typed. 

The system achieves up to 80% accuracy, allowing it to reconstruct sentences based on the typist’s thoughts. By capturing 1,000 snapshots of brain activity every second, the AI can pinpoint the precise moment thoughts turn into words, syllables, and individual letters.

🧐What are the limitations? This technology, while promising, still faces several challenges. The MEG scanner requires a specially shielded room to block out interference from Earth's magnetic field, which is far stronger than the brain’s signals. Even small head movements can scramble the data. Additionally, the device itself is bulky and expensive—about half a ton and $2 million.

✨In conclusion - Although the technology is still in its early stages, Meta’s research could revolutionize brain science and offer new possibilities for treating brain injuries and illnesses. Its non-invasive nature also presents a less invasive alternative to brain implants, like those being tested by Neuralink. While the scanner might seem impractical for now, history has shown that lab-bound technologies can often become much more accessible, portable over time.

Read the full story here.