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Taking on Google seems like a do-or-die proposition, considering the long list of companies that have tried and failed. But Amazon founder Jeff Bezos recently bet on perplexity AI. The startup is trying to take on the search giants despite difficult odds.
“Startups are all about being bold,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas recently said luck. “Are you building a company with limitless potential? It’s risky, but if done right, the rewards are limitless.”
Founded in August 2022, Perplexity is an AI-based search that is “part chatbot and part search engine, providing real-time information and footnotes pointing to the source of the answer,” as described on its website. We aim to challenge Google by providing an engine.
In January, Srinivas shared in a blog post that Perplexity had grown to 10 million monthly active users and served more than 500 million queries by 2023. He also revealed that the company has raised $73.6 million from venture capitalists, companies including Nvidia, and various other companies. Through angel investors and Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions Fund.
This funding round valued Perplexity at approximately $520 million. Now, just a few months later, the venture firm has signed a new funding deal at a valuation of about $1 billion, according to reports this week. wall street journalThis was reported by an anonymous person familiar with the matter.
If accurate, that would mean Bezos’ investment has nearly doubled in a matter of months. Almost 30 years ago, he was impressed by Perplexity’s ability to reach his 10 million monthly active users in a short period of time, as was the “amazing statistic” of the web growing at 2,300% per year. There is no doubt about it. It inspired him to start Amazon..
He wasn’t the only investor to take note of the startup’s rapid growth. Perplexity is “one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs,” said Jonathan Cohen, vice president of applied research at Nvidia, in his January stated in the funding announcement. Artificial intelligence will “change the way we access information,” he added.
CEO Srinivas certainly believes so, and even though he’s sifted through Google search many times, he thinks he’s had enough of it.
“Google will be seen as legacy and old, and Perplexity will be seen as next-gen and future,” he told Reuters in January.
Of course, Google isn’t silent either. In fact, the company is testing his AI-powered search with millions of users.
Srinivas recently said: luckHowever, Google “has no incentive to actually move quickly and make this product experience a success because its core revenue comes from getting people to click on links or view links.”
Perplexity makes money by offering a Pro version for $20 a month that lets users choose from a variety of large language models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, or the company’s own LLM Perplexity .
“Our value proposition is that the free product is already so good that you can still use it without paying, but the paid product is going to be insane,” Srinivas said. said. luck.
He also expects more people to use AI chatbots instead of Google when searching for things online.
“The days of SEO spam, sponsored links, and sifting through multiple web pages will be replaced by more efficient ways to consume and share information,” he said in a January announcement. And as said, wall street journal Around the same time, he said, “If you could answer someone’s question directly, no one would need those 10 blue links.”
Of course, even if Perplexity were to be valued at $1 billion, it would have vast resources and AI talent at its disposal to truly compete with Google, whose parent company Alphabet is valued at $1.7 trillion. There is a long road ahead.
This article originally appeared on Fortune.com
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