Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas has announced his plans to expand in France on Tuesday, through a partnership with Bouygues Telecom. He also said that their subscribers would get one year of Perplexity Pro for free, which gives them access to all the frontier models, pro searches with reasoning, and voice mode interactions.
The partnership has been termed as a “first of its kind partnership with France,” and was first announced during the AI action summit held between Feb. 10 and 11 in Paris, France and attended by heads of state, leaders of international organizations, CEOs of small and large companies, representatives of academia, private organizations, artists and members of civil society. Other carrier partners working with Perplexity include Deutsche Telekom, Telefónica, SoftBank, and SK Telecom.
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Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine that uses large language models to answer queries using sources from the web and cites links within the text response. Founded in 2022, it has received significant attention of late for numerous reasons. It recently released the Sonar API for online search, and according to Perplexity, Sonar Pro outperformed leading models from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic, on a benchmark measuring factual correctness in AI chatbot answers.
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Perplexity has also been in the talks for a merger with TikTok, following the pressure on TikTok to divest from ByteDance for its U.S.-based operations, because of security concerns. It has also been one of the much-talked about AI companies following DeepSeek’s disruption of the industry with its cost-effective AI model. Srinivas had expressed concern over censorship and propaganda with DeepSeek, and suggested users use Perplexity instead.
Bouygues Telecom is a French mobile phone, Internet service provider and IPTV company, part of the Bouygues group. It is the third oldest mobile network operator in France, after Orange and SFR, and before Free Mobile, and provides 2G GSM, 3G UMTS, 4G LTE and 5G NR services.