Perplexity update outperforms ChatGPT's paid plan (and it's free)

Perplexity is an AI-powered search tool designed for research, offering users the ability to ask questions and generate responses based on multiple sources.

In a LinkedIn Post on Friday, Perplexity announced that file and image uploads will be receiving an expanded context window of 1 million tokens for free users. Meaning, users uploading files, or images, will be able to upload substantially more content for processing, as long as they have an account.

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A 1 million token context window is massive - allowing users to process an entire book (350-400 pages), a month's worth of financial reports (1,000 pages of PDFs), or tens of thousands of lines of code (25,000-50,000 lines) at a time. For reference, ChatGPT's maximum context window caps out at 128,000 for OpenAI's GPT-4o - a model that's offered on a paid plan.

Perplexity as a tool operates with a far more narrow focus. You won't use it for coding, or building custom chatbots - it's a tool specialised for research. And it does its job exceptionally well.

ChatGPT recently made its search feature and latest model, the o3-mini, available for free in a bid to compete against DeepSeek. Combined with the functionality offered by Deep Research, ChatGPT has built a well-rounded package that leave many users satisfied.

Though despite that, if you're a student, researcher, or generally looking for a search engine alternative - it's worth giving Perplexity a go.