Amid ongoing controversy about dealing with of media articles and authentic reporting, AI-powered search startup Perplexity now shows outcomes for factual queries comparable to climate and time at a spot, forex conversion, and solutions to basic math queries straight by way of playing cards. This can be a transfer to cease Perplexity customers from going to different serps like Google for such outcomes.

To be clear, Perplexity might already fetch this information from the net and show leads to a descriptive approach, however the firm is including some visible aptitude to those outcomes to make them extra outstanding and fast. On X, CEO Aravind Srinivas mentioned that these fundamental queries now ought to work quick on the search engine.

Notably, Srinivas mentioned final yr that Google handles fundamental queries like climate, time and dwell sports activities scores effectively, and his firm had numerous work to do. Whereas Google shows numerous card-based data, together with sports activities event tables and fundamental film data, Perplexity additionally strikes within the path of displaying direct outcomes as an alternative of fetching from different sources.

For these new search outcomes, comparable to climate data and forex conversions, Perplexity doesn’t hyperlink to any sources. Final month, Srinivas talked about that the search startup was working with an organization referred to as Tako, an AI search engine for visualizing data, to show data comparable to inventory costs.

Perplexity confronted criticism from the media earlier this month, when Forbes govt editor John Paczkowski identified that the search engine confirmed Forbes’ authentic, paywalled reporting about ex-Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s drone firm in search outcomes with out correct attribution and with close to equivalent writing language in Perplexity’s not too long ago launched Pages characteristic. Forbes mentioned that its reporting was additionally talked about prominently in Perplexity’s AI-generated podcast.

The argument from varied critics is that with out correct credit and getting sufficient link-back visitors in return, AI-powered serps producing (or re-generating) media content material will eat up publications’ enterprise.

Final week, the Amazon-backed startup’s chief enterprise officer, Dmitry Shevelenko, informed Semafor that the corporate was already exploring revenue-sharing offers with publications. He mentioned that these offers would enable the publishers to earn recurring earnings.