Perplexity could be the latest entrant in the hot AI coding wars. The San Francisco-based AI search startup has created an internal AI coding tool that it may release publicly later, a person familiar with the matter said. For now, Perplexity has dubbed the tool “Teammate” and its engineers have been using it since May,
Perplexity could be the latest entrant in the hot AI coding wars.
The San Francisco-based AI search startup has created an internal AI coding tool that it may release publicly later, a person familiar with the matter said.
For now, Perplexity has dubbed the tool “Teammate” and its engineers have been using it since May, according to screenshots obtained by Business Insider.
It’s unclear exactly if or when Perplexity, which was valued at $20 billion in a funding round last year, will launch the product. Doing so would put Perplexity (originally focused on an AI-powered search engine that competes with Google) much closer to competing for supremacy with Cursor, Anthropic and OpenAI, all of which have created widely used AI coding products.
The teammate is meant to supervise the software. projects from start to finish, according to an internal announcement seen by Business Insider.
“It is designed for long-term engineering work: owning projects, investigating problems, and monitoring services,” the announcement reads.
A Perplexity spokesperson declined to comment.
Perplexity engineers have tasked the tool with tasks such as finding errors in internal systems, as the screenshots show.
The AI tool is model-agnostic, meaning it is not built on any particular chatbot, the person familiar with the matter said.
Perplexity CTO Denis Yarats also urged the startup’s engineers to use AI for coding.
A few weeks before Teammate’s internal launch, the executive wrote in messages seen by Business Insider that by the end of the year or sooner, software engineers should “stop looking at the code” and simply use AI.
Yarats also defended AI against accusations that it produces “poor” or poor-quality code.
“The slop will not exist” as long as the code it generates passes quality checks, Yarats wrote.
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