Radar / AI infrastructure / Perplexity Photon
Perplexity Photon
Rust-based retrieval engine powering Perplexity's new Fast Search API, cutting p99 latency from 800ms to 65ms.
Why it matters
Makes sub-100ms web retrieval a product feature: an API search_type:'fast' tier priced at $1 per 1K requests, positioning Perplexity's retrieval stack against Exa Instant and Tavily.
What you could build with it
An indie hacker could build a real-time market-news alerting service on the Fast Search API, where sub-100ms retrieval makes per-second polling economically viable at $1 per 1K requests.
Does it hold up?
Too early to judge - announced today via API; latency figures are vendor benchmarks, no third-party measurements yet.
Learn more
First spotted on article: source.
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