Quick Take: Perplexity just supercharged its Pro offering with “Labs,” an AI-powered project builder that goes way beyond Q&A. It’s for Pro users who need to turn research into actual deliverables like reports, spreadsheets, dashboards, and even simple web apps, automating what used to take days.
🚀 The Crunch:
🎯 Direct Impact: Stop just getting answers; start building with them. Labs automates the grunt work of turning research into tangible project outputs, directly in Perplexity. If you’re a Pro user, this means faster prototyping and deliverable creation, letting you go from idea to initial product in record time.
Critical Caveats/Requirements
- Pro Subscription Required: This is a premium feature for Perplexity Pro users.
- Time Investment: Labs takes longer (10+ minutes) than standard “Research” mode because it’s doing significantly more complex work to generate actual project deliverables.
🔬 The Dive:
With the launch of Perplexity Labs, they’re giving Pro subscribers a powerful AI assistant that acts more like a junior project team. The goal? To take your ideas and research and transform them into actual, usable project deliverables—think comprehensive reports, data-filled spreadsheets, interactive dashboards, and even simple, functional web applications.
How Labs Gets It Done: The Engine Room
- Your AI Coder & Data Wrangler: Labs can write Python scripts (or other code as needed) to structure messy data, apply complex formulas, generate visualizations like charts, and then output the results as formatted documents or spreadsheets. You define the task, Labs handles the scripting.
- From Research to Rudimentary App: One of the slickest features is the ability to generate simple web applications. Imagine needing a quick data dashboard from a CSV or a dynamic presentation. Labs can build these out and host them within an “App” tab directly in your Lab project. No need to fire up a separate IDE or deployment pipeline for these initial versions.
- Everything in its Right Place (The “Assets” Tab): All the digital bits and pieces Labs creates—images, charts, CSV files, the code itself—are neatly corralled into an “Assets” tab. This means no more digging through downloads; everything is organized and ready for you.
Labs vs. “Research” Mode: Know Your Tools
So, when do you use Labs versus Perplexity’s standard (and now renamed) “Research” mode? Think of it this way: “Research” provides the detailed briefing; “Labs” builds the first draft of the project based on that briefing.
Perplexity clarifies the distinction: “Research” mode (formerly “Deep Research”) is your go-to for the fastest, most comprehensive answers to complex questions, usually delivering in 3-4 minutes. It’s about getting the information you need, fast.
Labs, on the other hand, is designed for a different purpose. It invests significantly more time (10 minutes or longer) and leverages a much broader toolkit, including advanced file generation and mini-app creation.
This expanded capability empowers you to develop a much wider array of deliverables for your projects, moving beyond information retrieval to actual creation. It’s a significant step for Perplexity, positioning it as a tool not just for knowledge acquisition but for knowledge application and rapid project development.
TLDR: Perplexity Labs (Pro only!) is your new AI sidekick that builds actual stuff—reports, apps, spreadsheets—from your ideas. Less research, more doing. Go from zero to project draft, super fast.
