Perplexity is an independent AI as far as I can tell/
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/perplexity-is-an-independant-a-IOAmEtuARUSFR8h36A_9Fg
Its major investor is Jeff Bezos. Meta’s chief spook Yarat supplied the AI.
“As of 2024, Perplexity has raised $165 million in funding, valuing the company at over $1 billion.[1] Investors include Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, Databricks, Bessemer Venture Partners, Susan Wojcicki, Jeff Dean, Yann LeCun, Andrej Karpathy, Nat Friedman, and Garry Tan.[4][6][1]”
“Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Aravind Srinivas, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, engineers with backgrounds in back-end systems, AI and machine learning. Yarats, the CTO, was an AI research scientist at Meta, while Srinivas, the CEO, worked at OpenAI as an AI researcher”