Given the long list of corporations which have tried and failed, Google’s challenge looks as if a failure. However, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently placed a bet on Perplexity AI, a startup that’s taking over the search giant despite daunting odds.
“Startups are all about courage,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said recently Fortune. “Are you constructing a company that has unlimited potential? It’s dangerous, but in case you succeed, the reward will probably be limitless.”
Founded in August 2022, Perplexity goals to challenge Google by offering Search engine powered by artificial intelligence that’s, “part chatbot and part search engine, offering real-time information and footnotes showing the sources of its answers,” according to its website states.
In January, Srinivas shared: blog post that Perplexity’s energetic user count grew to 10 million monthly energetic users (MAU) and handled over half a billion queries in 2023. He also revealed that the corporate had raised $73.6 million from enterprise capitalists, corporations including Nvidia, and various angel investors, as well as Jeff Bezos through his Bezos Expedition Fund.
The financing round valued Perplexity at roughly $520 million. Now, just a few months later, the enterprise is finalizing a latest financing deal price roughly $1 billion, according to report this week By “Wall Street” day by daywhich quoted anonymous people acquainted with the matter.
If true, it means Bezos’ investment has almost doubled in a matter of months. Without a doubt, Perplexity’s ability to quickly reach 10 million monthly energetic users impressed him, just as it did almost thirty years ago with the “startling statistic” of the network growing at a rate of 2,300% per yr inspired him to start Amazon.
He was not the one investor who noticed the startup’s rapid development. Perplexity is “one of the few consumer AI products to reach the significant milestone of 10 million MAUs,” Jonathan Cohen, vice chairman of applied research at Nvidia, said in a January funding announcement. Artificial intelligence, he added, “will change the way we access information.”
CEO Srinivas definitely thinks so and has repeatedly searched the Google search engine, which he says has turn out to be tiring.
“Google will be seen as something outdated and outdated, and Perplexity will be seen as something that belongs to the next generation and the future,” he said. he said Reuters in January.
Of course, Google isn’t sitting still. Indeed, it was testing AI-powered seek for tens of millions of users.
Srinivas recently said Fortunenonetheless, Google “has no incentive to actually move quickly and deliver a user experience for this product because its primary revenue comes from encouraging people to click and browse links.”
Perplexity makes money by offering a Pro version for $20 per 30 days, which allows users to select from a variety of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, or Perplexity’s own LLM.
“Our value proposition is that the free product is already so good that you can still use it without having to pay for it, but the paid product will be crazy,” Srinivas said Fortune.
He also hopes that individuals will increasingly use chatbots based on artificial intelligence as an alternative of using Google when on the lookout for information on the Internet.
“The days of sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links and multiple websites will be replaced by a much more efficient way of consuming and sharing information,” he wrote in the January issue announcement. And like him he said the “Wall Street” day by day around the identical time: “If you can answer someone’s question directly, no one needs those 10 blue links.”
Of course, even when Perplexity does indeed achieve a $1 billion valuation, it has a great distance to go to truly challenge Google, which has vast resources and talent in artificial intelligence and whose parent Alphabet is valued at $1.7 trillion .
Credit : fortune.com
