resurfaced video On patrol X shows the once-famous Jeff Bezos explaining why he founded Amazon in 1997. In other words, he discovered the „alarming statistic“ that web usage is growing at 2,300% per year. He thought it made sense to start an online retailer and ride the wave.
Now the billionaire is making a new bet in an area that directly challenges the wave of artificial intelligence. Google. Bezos is not the only major tech investor.
The startup known as Perplexity was founded in August 2022. AI-based search engine It’s „part chatbot and part search engine, providing real-time information and footnotes indicating the source of the answer.“ according to Its website.
When making investment decisions, Bezos undoubtedly considered the numbers, just as he did in the 1990s. Although Perplexity is not yet profitable, it has quickly grown to 10 million monthly active users while almost completely omitting traditional marketing, according to the company. Additionally, the company claims that more than 1 million people have installed its mobile app on iOS and Android platforms, and that it responded to more than 500 million queries last year.
Thursday, San Francisco-based Perplexity announced The company announced it has raised $73.6 million from a group of investors led by venture capital firm IVP, including $1.2 trillion AI chip giant Bezos. Nvidiaand Shopify Co-founder Tobias Lütke.
Perplexity is „one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs,“ Jonathan Cohen, Nvidia’s vice president of applied research, said in the announcement. He believes AI will “change the way we access information.”
„Google will be seen as outdated and outdated,“ said Perplexity CEO Avarind Srinivas, a former OpenAI researcher. Said Reuters this week. “Perplexity will be seen as the next generation and the future.”
Valuation: $520 million
Perplexity offers a Pro version for $20 per month, allowing users to choose from a variety of large-scale language models, including OpenAI’s GPT-4, Anthropic’s Claude 2.1, Google’s Gemini, or the venture’s own LLM Perplexity. Masu.
Admittedly, there is a long way to go before the confusion is resolved. His annual revenue from subscriptions and sales of his AI software „Srinivas“ ranges from just $5 million to around $10 million. Said of wall street journal. The company plans to use the new funding to expand its workforce from the current 38 to about 60 by the end of the year.
Despite such modest numbers, this week’s funding round estimates the venture’s value to be around $520 million.
Of course, Google’s parent company Alphabet has a market capitalization of over $1.7 trillion, and Google dominates online search with about 90% market share. OpenAI released his ChatGPT in late 2022, long before the current AI boom began, and has fended off many challengers and remains the leader in AI.and it is Testing AI-powered search It works by itself on millions of users.
meanwhile, microsoft Built-in OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 has been integrated into the Bing search engine, leaving it far behind Google.
Still, Google faces little immediate danger. May hurt in the long run If people use less search engines and more AI chatbots when looking for things online.
“No one needs those 10 blue links if you can directly answer someone’s question,” Srinivas said. journal.
he I have written This week’s announcement states, „We are at an inflection point in a massive behavioral shift in how people access information online…The days of SEO spam, sponsored links, and sifting through multiple web pages are gone. It will be replaced by a much more efficient way of consuming and sharing information.”
His business is still a long way off, but so was Amazon when the web was taking off. Now it’s AI, and Bezos is betting that Perplexity will weather it well.