Posted on 01/04/2024 11:22:18 AM PST by Red Badger
Perplexity, a startup going after Google’s dominant position in web search, has won backing from Jeff Bezos and venture capitalists betting that artificial intelligence will upend the way people find information online.
Started less than two years ago, Perplexity has fewer than 40 employees and is based out of a San Francisco co-working space. The company’s product, which it calls an answer engine, is used by about 10 million people monthly.
Those ingredients were enough to persuade Institutional Venture Partners, Bezos and other tech executives to invest $74 million in the company, the largest sum raised by an internet search startup in recent years. The investment valued Perplexity at $520 million, including the new money, said Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas.
Amazon.com, the e-commerce company chaired by Bezos, has committed to investing billions in Anthropic, the AI startup behind the chatbot Claude.
The path to competing with Google is littered with carcasses, and Microsoft itself has struggled for years to dislodge the company’s roughly 90% market share in online search. Others, including tech giants, are incorporating AI into their search engines.
Perplexity’s founders said their advantage is using advances in AI to provide direct answers, instead of website links, in response to search queries, without some of the limitations felt by larger companies.
“If you can directly answer somebody’s question, nobody needs those 10 blue links,” Srinivas said. Google has begun rolling out a feature that provides lengthy summaries in response to some search queries, though Google has yet to introduce it widely.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Ping!................
But how does the AI search the internet? Bing?
BRAVE already does this...................
When Perplexity gets big enough, or challenging enough to Google or Bing, they will be bought by either one of those. Bing most likely, since Bing/Microsoft feel like they ‘own’ AI.
Google search will be lessened in importance within 1-2 years.
All the AI search engines will eventually merge and become one big search engine that will call itself Omnius...........
If Perplexity wants greater public acceptance, they may consider changing that name.
When I hear the root word “perplexed”, I think
“confused or exasperated”, maybe even flummoxed!”
Will it be better than Alta Vista?
Interview with a former Google engineer:
https://www.brighteon.com/27376022-aab8-4f0c-855c-c5bb72dbb082
Published just yesterday.
Wow, ad popups cover the page, an ad video starts blaring, no thanks.
Don’t you have ad blockers?
Bezos has money to throw away, so he is throwing away. Other than that it means nothing. There is only viable to challenger to Google - Bing, who are as good or better than Google but far far behind in market share.
Yes.
FATAL FLAW? Without ad and affiliate revenue to support their sites, publishers have no incentive to keep providing the SOURCE material that Perplexity only exceprts and presents to users. This is the big problem with AI - so long as it does not reward source providers, those providers will become fewer, and AI’s derived “information” will become less relevant or up-to-date.
I watch stuff on Brighteon all the time and I don’t have any problems. They do advertise on the platform, as they have bills to pay, too.
They advertise too much.
That’s what the slider is for.
😊
If only someone would create what Google used to be 21 years ago when we could search for information like scholars.
Today Google search is approaching complete uselessness except for everyday shallow information to buy something or recent trivial and largely inaccurate mentions of important history and research questions.
Many topics you cannot do a search for no matter how you try quote marks or different keywords, you just can’t get to the subject you want.
Yeah, how are we gonna find pR0n now?..................
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