A resurfaced video making the rounds on X reveals a pre-famous Jeff Bezos explaining in 1997 why he based Amazon—specifically, a “startling statistic” he got here throughout that internet utilization was rising at 2,300% a yr. Driving that wave by beginning a web-based retailer made sense, he thought.
Now the billionaire is making one other guess on the wave of synthetic intelligence, in a sector that can immediately tackle Google. Bezos isn’t the one main tech investor, both.
Based in August 2022, the startup often known as Perplexity goals to problem Google by providing an AI-based search engine that’s “part chatbot and part search engine, offering real-time information and footnotes showing the sources of its answers,” according to its web site.
When deciding to take a position, Bezos was little doubt trying on the numbers, as he did within the Nineties. Perplexity, whereas nonetheless not worthwhile, has shortly grown to 10 million month-to-month energetic customers whereas virtually completely skipping conventional advertising and marketing, in keeping with the corporate. It additional claims that greater than one million individuals have put in its cellular apps on the iOS and Android platforms, and it served over half a billion queries final yr.
On Thursday, San Francisco–primarily based Perplexity announced that it has raised $73.6 million from a bunch of buyers led by enterprise capital agency IVP and together with Bezos, the $1.2 trillion AI chip big Nvidia, and Shopify cofounder Tobias Lütke.
Perplexity is “one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs,” stated Jonathan Cohen, VP of Utilized Analysis at Nvidia, within the announcement. AI will “transform how we access information,” he believes.
“Google is going to be viewed as something that’s legacy and old,” Perplexity CEO Avarind Srinivas, a former OpenAI researcher, told Reuters this week. “Perplexity will be viewed as something that’s the next generation and future.”
$520 million valuation
Perplexity affords a Professional model for $20 per thirty days that permits customers to choose from numerous massive language fashions, amongst them OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, Google’s Gemini, or the enterprise’s personal LLM Perplexity.
Perplexity has an extended approach to go, to make sure. It makes solely about $5 million to $10 million in annual income from subscriptions and promoting its AI software program, Srinivas told the Wall Avenue Journal. It can use the brand new funding to develop from 38 workers now to about 60 by yr’s finish.
Regardless of such meager figures, this week’s funding spherical values the enterprise at about $520 million.
In fact, Google mother or father Alphabet has a market cap of greater than $1.7 trillion, and Google dominates on-line search with roughly 90% market share. It has fended off many challengers and has been a pacesetter in AI since nicely earlier than OpenAI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, kicking off the present AI growth. And it’s testing AI-powered search itself on tens of millions of customers.
In the meantime, Microsoft has incorporated OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 into its Bing search engine, lengthy a distant second to Google.
Nonetheless, whereas Google faces little fast hazard, it could be hurt in the long run if individuals begin utilizing its search engine much less and AI chatbots extra as they search for issues on-line.
“If you can directly answer somebody’s question, nobody needs those 10 blue links,” Srinivas informed the Journal.
He wrote within the announcement this week, “We stand at the inflection point of a massive behavioral shift in how people access information online…The times of sifting through SEO spam, sponsored links, and multiple web pages will be replaced by a much more efficient way to consume and share information.”
His enterprise remains to be an extended shot, however then, so was Amazon when the net was the wave to experience. Now it’s AI, and Bezos is putting a guess that Perplexity will experience it nicely.
