ChatPerplexity

ChatPerplexity(
    system_prompt=None,
    model=None,
    api_key=None,
    base_url='https://api.perplexity.ai/',
    seed=MISSING,
    kwargs=None,
)

Chat with a model hosted on perplexity.ai.

Perplexity AI is a platform for running LLMs that are capable of searching the web in real-time to help them answer questions with information that may not have been available when the model was trained.

Prerequisites

API key

Examples

import os
from chatlas import ChatPerplexity

chat = ChatPerplexity(api_key=os.getenv("PERPLEXITY_API_KEY"))
chat.chat("What is the capital of France?")

Parameters

Name	Type	Description	Default
system_prompt	Optional[str]	A system prompt to set the behavior of the assistant.	`None`
model	Optional[str]	The model to use for the chat. The default, None, will pick a reasonable default, and warn you about it. We strongly recommend explicitly choosing a model for all but the most casual use.	`None`
api_key	Optional[str]	The API key to use for authentication. You generally should not supply this directly, but instead set the `PERPLEXITY_API_KEY` environment variable.	`None`
base_url	str	The base URL to the endpoint; the default uses Perplexity’s API.	`'https://api.perplexity.ai/'`
seed	Optional[int] \| MISSING_TYPE	Optional integer seed that ChatGPT uses to try and make output more reproducible.	`MISSING`
kwargs	Optional['ChatClientArgs']	Additional arguments to pass to the `openai.OpenAI()` client constructor.	`None`

Returns

Name	Type	Description
	Chat	A chat object that retains the state of the conversation.

Note

This function is a lightweight wrapper around chatlas.ChatOpenAI with the defaults tweaked for perplexity.ai.

Note

Pasting an API key into a chat constructor (e.g., ChatPerplexity(api_key="...")) is the simplest way to get started, and is fine for interactive use, but is problematic for code that may be shared with others.

Instead, consider using environment variables or a configuration file to manage your credentials. One popular way to manage credentials is to use a .env file to store your credentials, and then use the python-dotenv package to load them into your environment.

pip install python-dotenv

# .env
PERPLEXITY_API_KEY=...

from chatlas import ChatPerplexity
from dotenv import load_dotenv

load_dotenv()
chat = ChatPerplexity()
chat.console()

Another, more general, solution is to load your environment variables into the shell before starting Python (maybe in a .bashrc, .zshrc, etc. file):

export PERPLEXITY_API_KEY=...