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 ...
I can set up a site but that site was so overboard that it is best to just move on.
If a site makes you work to read it then just go somewhere else, it is like a gas station that runs ads at the pump, just go somewhere else.
When I said set up a site I meant for myself as a consumer, I can use extensions to strip a site I’m visiting to make it appear bare bones on my personal screen, I did not mean that I create online websites.
Business Rule #1: Never start a business that starts with “PERP”.
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