ThursdAI — the weekly AI news podcast hosted by Alex Volkov — has covered 6 Perplexity releases since Jan 2025, most recently Perplexity Computer on Feb 26, 2026. Highlights include R1-1776, pplx-embed, Sonar Pro Search API, Perplexity Pro with R1. 2 of them shipped with open weights. Every entry below has primary-source links and the episode segment where we covered it live.
Perplexity introduces Perplexity Computer
Perplexity launched Perplexity Computer, an agentic computer product announced via its blog. It was discussed as part of the week's convergence on agent harnesses, automations, and cloud-based agent workflows across labs.
Perplexity launches pplx-embed SOTA embedding models
Perplexity released pplx-embed, a family of state-of-the-art embedding models built for web-scale retrieval. The models are available on Hugging Face and through Perplexity's API with quickstart docs.
Perplexity launches privacy-first Email Assistant for inbox management
Perplexity launched an Email Assistant that manages your inbox with a privacy-first pitch, drafting replies and triaging mail. It extends Perplexity's push from search into day-to-day agentic productivity surfaces.
Perplexity releases R1-1776, a censorship-free DeepSeek R1 fine-tune
Perplexity open-sourced R1-1776, a fine-tuned version of DeepSeek R1 designed to remove Chinese government censorship on topics like Tiananmen Square and Taiwanese independence. They used human experts to identify around 300 sensitive topics and built a censorship classifier to train the bias out, claiming no significant impact on standard eval performance. The name 1776 is a nod to American independence.
Perplexity adds DeepSeek R1 as a Pro reasoning model option
Perplexity integrated DeepSeek R1 into its Pro search product, letting subscribers choose R1 as the reasoning model behind answers. It was one of several tools that raced to host R1 on Western infrastructure within days of the model's release.
Perplexity ships Sonar Pro search API and an Android AI assistant
Perplexity released its Sonar Pro search-grounded API, giving developers programmatic access to Perplexity-style web-grounded answers, and also launched an AI assistant for Android. Two shipping moves that push Perplexity beyond its consumer answer engine.
Never miss a Perplexity launch — we cover every release live, every Thursday.