In today's video, I'm going to teach you everything that you need to know about perplexity so that whether you're researching or you're coding or using it for any other task like writing, by the end of this video, you're going to know how to best fit perplexity into your workflow. We're going to start with the basics, like the settings in perplexity and the pricing. It will work our way up into some more advanced prompting techniques for when you're doing your research or your coding.
When you first open up Perplexity, this is what you're going to see, and you'll notice that it has this Pro toggle right here. I have the Pro version of Perplexity, so I can turn this on if I want to, and it's going to give me access to those Pro features. So when you sign up for Perplexity Pro, you're going to get unlimited Pro search.
This is going to give you access to their search tool, and you're not going to get capped out. Unlimited file uploads, meaning you can share different PDFs, CSVs, any types of images, or any real types of files. for them to be analyzed within your chats with Claude and ChatGPT, which are the models that are running behind Perplexity Pro. And this is what I love about Perplexity. They're always on the cutting edge, giving you access to the upgraded AI models from all the different open source and closed source models.
When you sign up, they're even going to give you some API credits because the API is charged on a per use basis. So when you're actually using the API for Perplexity and you're developing with it. you're going to be paying for it on a quota metered sort of basis.
But Perplexity Pro is a no brainer when it comes to being able to access the latest cutting edge models in one place for one simple price. I believe I'm paying $20 per month for it, which is more than worth it if you consider how much Claude and ChatGPT costs just on their own. And sometimes you're going to run out of credits with Claude or you're going to run out of a quota with ChatGPT. But with Perplexity, I found that it lasts all day.
You'll also notice that if you click on this little character in the bottom corner here, you'll see that you have settings. So if you go to settings right here, you can change your system theme. You can change it from light to dark, or you can go based on what your system is set to by default.
You can change your language, your avatar. That's your picture right here. You can change your username, and I better actually change mine pretty soon because that's pretty generic.
And you can also turn off data retention if you don't want it keeping access to your searches and things like that. Down here, you can manage your subscription. You can change the default AI model that it's using.
And you can also change the default image generation model. And you can now use Flux 1 with perplexity, which is amazing because Flux 1 is the most cutting edge AI image generation model around from what I've seen. Looks like you can also refer friends.
Maybe they have some kind of sign up bonus for that. and then some more system settings down here. If I change over to the profile tab, you're going to notice that I have some custom instructions right here that I can add right out of the gate.
I can give it information about myself so that whenever perplexity is prompting or searching, it's going to have this context about me in mind that it can go from. It also has the API tab where you can access the API features. You get access to your available credits. You can generate API keys right here. And then if you want to access the enterprise settings and you have a team, then you can go to this tab right here, which will take you off the page.
Now, when you want to start prompting with perplexity, it's as simple as making a search. This is very reminiscent of the early days of searching on the internet when you would type something into Google or hit I'm feeling lucky. But these days, perplexity is doing a lot of the legwork and the research for you. Let's shift our focus to the focus tab right here.
So if I click the focus tab, it's actually going to allow me to switch the modality of this model and what it wants to focus on. So if I select web, it's just going to do normal web searches. Academic is going to give me access to published academic papers, and it's going to reference those in my responses or the responses of the assistant. There's this math mode.
If you have math equations to solve writing mode, just for strictly writing pros video, which is going to allow you to basically look at video resources and transcribe those and then take notes out of that. And then there's social, which is going to look on things like Quora and Reddit, and it's going to find what the public thinks about a topic. I'm just going to keep it on web for now. And right off the bat, it gives us a few suggestions for the news today. And it's really giving us a nice current view of some of the things that are down the pipeline.
Now, I just got a 3D printer and I want to research products that are going to be good products to sell on Etsy. So I'm just going to say. research the latest 3D print products that I can quickly create and sell on Etsy. And the beauty of perplexity is it's just like searching the internet, except what I would use to type in for this is maybe like top 3D printing products for 2024. But now it's just going to automatically know what to search and all of the different research that it needs to do. So if I search now, it's actually going to go and do the search first.
It's going to search for different queries here, and it's going to show me all of those things that it's searching for on my behalf. And it's actually just going to go out and read the articles a lot faster than I can. I mean, look, it pulled together all of these sources in just a few seconds. And now it's giving me an answer.
It's telling me exactly how much some of these toys are actually making. It's giving me ideas for different personalized items here. Home decor, let's see, functional items, always a good idea with 3D printing to print those. functional items.
Awesome. And then it even gives me tips for success down here. And what you'll notice is that it has these little bubbles right here that show you exactly where it got these different stats from, where it got these different ideas from.
And then you can actually click on these sources and it'll open up that source for you. And it'll show you exactly where it got that information from. So this is just a basic search prompt, but next I want to show you a way that you can split your tasks inside of Perplexity to make them more effective.
So here's my original prompt. I'm going to go back to perplexity and I'm going to start a new thread. I'm going to paste that in and let's actually break this prompt down. So first I want to research the markets. So I'm just going to say research markets in 3D printing that I can make an income with.
Make sure they are relevant and trending to 2024. Now, the idea here is, is I actually want to split this into some steps for the model to go through. So for the first one here, I'll say research for the second one. I'm just going to say rank these markets in order from best to worst. And then three, I'm going to say select three products in each market that we can 3D print.
Then four, I'm going to say criticize your final response and alter it. I'm going to say five. give your final product recommendation. So the difference here is I'm asking it to basically do the same thing, but I'm giving it steps in order.
And perplexity is really good at taking these different steps and actually doing these different tasks right within one chat. So if I hit start and I send this off, now it's actually going to include those in its search. So it's researching the trending 3D print markets, and then it's going to rank the identified markets.
Like I said here, then it's going to find the three products. And as you can see, it's going through these steps and actually thinking it through and doing different actions based on that. So it's going to give me this final answer now.
And it looks like the number one product that I can create is customized prosthetics and orthotics. Or I could go with something like custom jewelry or personalized figurines. One of the other neat things about Perplexity is you can ask it follow-up questions after it's giving you this information and it will go out and do further research. It even gives you some related topics that you can branch off from and some ideas that you can search on top of this.
Now, what if you have something coming up, like you have an important school assignment or you have something really serious that you're researching and you want to get really credible, scientifically accurate resources? Well, unfortunately, the web is not the best place to look for that stuff. So what I recommend is clicking your focus tab here and switching to academic mode for these types of scenarios. And I can type in things like, what are the leading 10 causes of Alzheimer's?
Let's say I'm doing a research paper on that and I want to learn more, right? So I'd type that in. And even though I got Alzheimer's spelled wrong, probably it's going to figure out what I'm looking for.
And it's going to do its search the same type of way. But now it's looking at like PubMed, NCBI, and other resources like so. And it's giving us the risk factors and potential causes in order right here. So this is just amazing. It's a revolutionary technology.
And I don't think people realize just how important this is for things like research. So these are all things that for the most part, you can't control. So I'm just going to say, give me the top 10 lifestyle factors for getting this disease that people can control.
I can make it more practical for myself and I can actually get this scientific data and then apply it to my own life. Number one, physical activity. Number two, diet.
It's actually giving me specifics on the Mediterranean diet and modifying like a ketogenic diet in order to have better results with Alzheimer's disease. So not only can we search the normal web, we can also search from scholarly databases and we can get articles that are actually backed by peer review. And then we can ask AI questions about that, which is really exciting. Before you go any further into this video, I have something I need to tell you about, and that is the AI Foundations community. This is where I learn everything about AI and where I also teach AI alongside my brother who runs a channel on YouTube called AI Foundations.
We make AI content for free here on YouTube and we always have because we love to do it. We love to share these awesome tools. But if you want to up your network and get around some amazing people, I mean, we have a guy that built an app that has 300 million downloads.
We have many multi multi millionaires that join our calls and just talk about their businesses and how AI is affecting the landscape. And then we have a lot of just everyday people as well that are just trying to figure out how AI fits into their work. No matter who you are, you're welcome at AI foundations and I highly recommend you join AI foundations. Use the link below before the price goes up.
The next one that we're going to look at is the math focus. So if I switch to the math focus here, I can do things like, well, convert a hundred Euro to USD, and it's actually going to take the current exchange rate from online and finalize that conversion for us. So many conversion calculators are going to be connected to an API or some kind of live data stream in order to pull this off. But with perplexity, you can just have it search the web for you and do the conversion in one request.
using this math option right here. And it's also giving us the currency conversion for all of these other popular currencies. All right, next, I'm trying a little bit more of a difficult math question, and it's actually using Wolfram Alpha for this particular question right here. And it's going to walk us through all of the steps to figure out this derivation. If there's anything that AI is getting really good at, that's writing.
And a lot of this writing can be extremely convincing, but particularly if we switch to writing with perplexity here, we can write using the most cutting edge model, no matter what it is, and we don't have to have all these different subscriptions to other services. So I can write up a nice email template for new onboards, let's say. So I could say write up an email template for onboarding new customers to my ad agency and getting all of their details. I'm going to send that off. And because it's on writing mode, it's mainly just going to focus on writing here.
It's not going to do a lot of search. So you may need to give it some more context when it comes to these writing tasks like so, because maybe you have some specifics with your company that. uh, are going to be different.
And maybe you're going to have some things that aren't quite as relevant here that it talks about. But one of the things you can also do is you can just switch to web, say, give me all the things I need in an onboarding or my ad agency that provides Facebook ads and Google ads. And this is something that would have just been invaluable years ago when I was running my agency.
And I. could imagine that I'd have lots of questions for it. So it's going to give me all of this information here.
I can copy this. Then I can take it over to the writing assistant because this actually has some nice, uh, you know, research done. So if I copy that, then I go back over here, we switch to writing and I say, create an onboarding email based on the criteria here, make it quick and easy to respond to.
And then I can send that off. Now it's created a little bit of a shorter email that has all the information in it that I need. And it also has like these yes or no questions right here so that it's not going too in depth if we don't necessarily need these particular accounts in the mix. The next focus tool that we're going to look at is video.
And this allows you to actually look inside of a video, grab the transcript, grab everything from it. And it allows us to research things a lot easier. So let's say how to.
make chicken parm. And what it's going to do now is it's going to look up recipes on YouTube for chicken parm in this particular case. So it's got all these YouTube videos, it's reading transcripts, and then it's going to come out with the ingredients right here, the cooking process, everything that we need based on all of these videos, not just one, but every single one of these videos, it's going to amalgamate them into the best possible recipe.
So let's say I want to make this recipe. a little bit unique. Find something interesting I can add to it.
And it's going to give me all of these awesome, unique answers for how I can add a bit of a flair to my chicken parm based on actual videos that real chefs have made. And finally, I want to show you the social one right here, because social is going to allow you to really get some good market research done. I'm just going to say, give me the top 10 consumer focused AI tools on the market.
right now. And this is really going to look at what people are actually using. What are the people talking about? It's going to look on things like Reddit here, and it's going to give me some really good answers.
And as you can see, it's going to give me the top 10 tools right here. And it's actually linking these to different Reddit posts that people are talking about these tools on. Next, we're going to talk about coding with perplexity.
And since it has Claude Sonnet 3.5 running behind it, it is pretty damn good at coding. So if I go to focus right here, change it back to web. Now I can actually do some coding tasks. And you could even switch it to academic if you want.
And you could go for some different agent frameworks or something like that. But for general coding projects, you can just go with web. I'm just going to say create a website for me.
And I'm going to put the homepage about services and contacts. And I'm going to say use vanilla JS, CSS, and HTML. And I'm going to say, tell me how to run it and edit it. So this is just one simple prompt. And it's actually going to do a lot of this coding for us right up front.
And then it's going to tell us how to implement it. And what you'll notice here is when it's doing its coding, it's actually going to do that in these little snippets down here. It's writing the CSS styles, outlining the basic HTML. It's doing this in steps. So it's going to tell us, create these three files.
So I'm going to do that. I'm going to go to my desktop here. we'll create a new folder, let's call it website.
And here I'm going to click into it, we'll create those files, I'll actually open up VS code. And I'll create the files in here. So it says index dot HTML, just pull that over, right index dot HTML, we'll copy that and paste it.
And we'll do another new file styles dot CSS, we'll find that copy paste. And then we'll grab this JavaScript right here, JavaScript functionality, and that's going to be the script dot j s script dot j s. And we're going to paste.
And now we have all this in here, it's probably a pretty basic website to begin with. But let's just scroll down and see if it shows us how to run this. So running the website, save all three files, and then double click the click the index dot HTML file to load it in the browser.
Okay, so I'll just hit Ctrl S. And now I'm going to double click this or actually, I have to go to my actual index.html, open that up in arc. And as you can see, it's gone ahead and given us a basic website. And obviously, it isn't working right out of the gate, but I haven't really given it any specifics on this. But if I went through and actually gave it some specifics, then I'm sure it could do a lot better. But the cool thing about perplexity is, is I can actually research things like research good UI and implement a better UI.
And then I'm going to say. insert some dummy text and images into the website so that it looks nice to begin with. Add an image behind the header as well for the background. So whatever good UI is, it's going to research that, figure it out, and then it's going to implement it for me and tell me how to make those changes to my files.
And then I'll have an even better website. So let's go ahead and, you know, half screen this. And then I've got my code here.
So it's redoing the HTML now. I'm just going to paste that. Grab the CSS, paste that.
And now we'll open it up here. And as you can see, it looks pretty solid. The picture isn't pulling in because I don't have a picture in there, but it's actually started to add some services. It's opened it up a little bit more widescreen. I could tell it to actually make it fill the window and I could give it.
instructions to be more responsive and even to research what that means to be more responsive. But overall, this is looking pretty good to start with. And I can tell it even wanted to put an image in here, but it didn't. Just for the fun of it, let's go ahead and add some images and improve the responsiveness. For images, I'm just going to use unsplash.com and I'm going to find some images that I like.
So let's just click here, find an image that we like. Let's go with this one right here. I'll copy the image address.
head over to perplexity, and paste that in. And I'm going to say make this image URL the background of the header, add this one for our team. And I'll grab another one of a team. Let's just type team looks well that has the unsplash on it. Let's go this one, copy image address.
And I'm going to say fill everything with more dummy info and make the menu text anchor link to things. Make the page filled and long. And then I'm going to say make the page responsive and snap to all screen sizes. Right now it's too small on my desktop. All right.
So now I gave it the images. I instructed on where to put the images. I told it to fill out some more dummy info, add anchor text. links so that the menu actually brings you somewhere.
And then also to make the page more responsive. Let's see what it can do. It's definitely adding a lot more details in here.
A lot more info. So the page will look a little bit more filled out, I think. We're just going to replace this index.html. We're getting up there. We're at 144 lines and the CSS.
All right. And it opened up just fine. It looks pretty solid. It doesn't have an image here, but it did insert the team image and it inserted this background here. And it's actually started to fill this out a bit for me. and it even added these nice animations.
Wow, look at that. The contact form is coming together. It even has like what type of query this is. It's starting to throw the details in the bottom here.
It's giving us a footer. Overall, this website is starting to look like a legit website. Now, perplexity isn't only made for coding, writing and searching.
It's also an amazing source of news. So as you can see here on the left hand side pane, they have this discover page. where other perplexity users, along with yourself, can curate news and actually pull things from the internet and then create new stories based upon that.
So as you can see here, they have all of these amazing stories. They have all of these different documentary type stories that they go over, the history of phone freaks, whatever that means. And yeah, they've just got a lot of cool, interesting topics here.
You can click into these. Like this one here, food dye makes skin transparent. It talks about a study that was done on rats that made their skin transparent.
And it just goes in depth. And it's like all these sources kind of curated from an answer. And then you can ask a follow-up question like, is this possible for humans? Like, I'm sure some people might be wondering that.
If this can turn skin of mice or rats transparent, can it do it for humans? And it's actually going to go through and like... do the research on this obscure topic here.
And it tells us that human skin is much thicker. The technique has only been demonstrated on mice so far, and it basically just gives the nuance of the answer and gives us in a very helpful way. And then if I wanted to share this, I could convert this into a page by hitting convert to page. And as you can see, it's going to create my own news article that I can now share for people as well.
And it's going to break it down into all these different articles about how using tartrazine for humans to make their skin transparent is not quite possible or proven yet. I can even add a new section if I just go up and hit add new section, and I can talk about what I want this section to be about. Other possible ways humans can see through their skin. Let's just say that's what we want it to be about.
So then it'll go on. It'll start writing sections about that and creating its own own titles for me. And it gives lots of great information in here with sources.
It even starts suggesting different topics that you can add to this article. And if you want to, you can even put media in here. So let me just type in the next one, which would be other similar treatments.
And it's actually going to put an image in here as well. I don't know if this image is relevant, but I can change it and it'll actually give me some other ideas. Now I can preview it. And if I want to, I can actually publish this so that my article goes out to everyone. Let's just go ahead and preview for now.
And as you can see, it looks pretty nice. This is what it'll look like if somebody were to see this after I published it. So what do you think is perplexity, the future of consuming and sharing your news?
I know I've used it to fact check myself a lot when I hear about a news story and I want to go research it more before I go talking about it. Next, you're going to want to direct your attention to the library tab. This is where you can see all of the threads that you've started and all of the pages that you've created. You can even organize your threads into a collection and you can even make it shareable. So you could bundle together a bunch of different AI queries that you've made and you could share it with someone else.
If you want to learn more about AI tools like Perplexity, then you should definitely join AI Foundations. This is the group where I first heard about Perplexity and it's a group that my brother and I run. He runs another channel on YouTube called AI Foundations and also has similar videos to mine, but we really pool all of our attention and resources into this group. And we do live community calls.
We create courses there on advanced AI topics, and we're really just trying to help connect the world with these amazing tools. So if that sounds like something that you would want to join, if sounds like something you'd want to take it up a notch with us on, then definitely join that community and see what it's all about. My favorite feature from perplexity is definitely the fact that it can just go through and it can search and research on my behalf, come up with different search terms and different search queries based on whatever it is I'm trying to figure out.
What's your favorite feature on perplexity? Let me know, leave a comment below. I hope you enjoyed this full perplexity walkthrough.