Perplexity

6 releases covered on ThursdAI · perplexity.ai ↗

February 2026

October 2025

February 2025

Perplexity
New ModelsOpen weights

R1-1776

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.

January 2025

Perplexity
Major Features & Updates

Perplexity Pro with R1

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
APIs & Platforms

Sonar Pro Search API

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.