Perplexity AI Brings More Artificial Intelligence Tools to Mac

Mac users now have another Artificial Intelligence assistant option available to them natively, thanks to the new Perplexity app for Mac.

Perplexity offers a free AI-powered answer engine that uses multiple models, including GPT-4o and Claude 3, and perhaps best of all, it cites sources with its answers, so that you can independently confirm or research more on your answers.

Another nice aspect of Perplexity for Mac is that it only requires MacOS Ventura 13 or newer, offering another native AI option for Mac users who aren’t yet on MacOS Sequoia (It’s worth remembering that you can also use ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, and other AI tools through the web on basically any operating system, and you can also run Llama LLM locally on a Mac (including an uncensored model if you don’t want bias)).

To get started, you’ll want to grab the free Perplexity for Mac app from the Mac App Store (it’s also available on their Github, but downloading an app from Github is notoriously obtuse for normal people who aren’t professional geeks like myself)

• Grab Perplexity free from the App Store (alternatively, you can get it from Github)

Perplexity app runs on your Mac in a nice clean app window, and is accessible by keyboard shortcut, Dock, or the menu bar.

Users do not need a login, an account, or a paid account, to be able to use the Perplexity desktop app on Mac, though you can pay $20/month for additional features like the ability to upload and analyze images and files, and you can create an account if you want to.

The free Perplexity version offers five “Pro” searches, but in my own testing, once you go beyond the five Pro searches, the responses and results are still great, I can’t really tell much difference between the two, making the free version more than adequate for most users.

Another nice thing about Perplexity is that it cites sources directly, which is arguably the weakest point of ChatGPT (other than the glaringly wild bias that it, and all AI systems, are currently being trained with), so while I still personally prefer ChatGPT overall and really enjoy the Mac client, Perplexity is a great choice too.

Whether you love Artificial Intelligence, hate it, or are completely indifferent to it, is almost irrelevant, because it’s here now, and knowing how to use these tools is beneficial both for understanding the technology, but also because for many people they’re genuinely useful. If you have yet to dabble into any of the AI tools, they’re built into Apple’s operating systems from iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and MacOS Sequoia 15.1, and beyond, and will only continue to advance, but even if your device isn’t compatible with Apple Intelligence and those operating systems, you can still use apps and services like Perplexity, ChatGPT, Gemini, and others, to gain access to powerful AI features.

What do you think of Perplexity for Mac? Do you have a preferred AI tool or use-case? Let us know any of your thoughts in the comments.