Perplexed by Perplexity’s Tweet

A tweet stopped me mid-scroll the other day. Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, wrote, "Considering making a simple, under $50 hardware device, that will reliably answer your questions voice to voice. Just do this, but do it very well. If this post gets more than 5000 likes, will definitely make it." When it surpassed that number, he posted, "Alright. LFG!" So there you have it – Perplexity is getting into the hardware business. Continue Reading →

Perplexity.ai Adds Personal Shopper

Whether you love or hate AI, one thing is for sure: the AI search wars have ignited a new era of innovation. In just the past few months, we've seen Microsoft introduce Bing Generative Search, Google introduce AI Overviews, OpenAI introduce SearchGPT, and now… drumroll please… Perplexity AI has added "Buy with Pro," where Pro subscribers ($20/month in the U.S.) can buy products directly from Perplexity's search results. Continue Reading →

Perplexity to Experiment with Ads

Perplexity.ai is planning to introduce advertising into its interface. In a post titled Why We’re Experimenting with Advertising, Perplexity outlined its approach: integrating sponsored questions crafted in collaboration with advertisers. While the questions will be labeled as sponsored, Perplexity says the answers will not be influenced by the advertiser. Instead, they will surface the paid advertisement next to the answer. The company's blog post did not show an example of the entire experience. Continue Reading →

Follow the AI Money

There are two stories in the news today that caught my attention: 1) News Corp is suing Perplexity.ai for aggregating and surfacing WSJ and NYPost content without permission or payment. 2) xAI launched its API, which reminded me that X changed its terms of services last week, informing users that it can (and most likely will) use any content posted on X (formerly Twitter) to train its AI models. Continue Reading →

NYT Says No to Perplexity

The New York Times has put Perplexity.ai on notice: "Don't crawl our site, or else!" This is a little comical since Google has been crawling nytimes.com since the beginning of Google, but we need a distinction here. Two verbs, both terms of art: "to crawl," which means to systematically browse the web, index content, and then make it searchable through a search engine; "to scrape," which is the automated process of gathering information from the web to collect content from webpages. Continue Reading →

Perplexity Ad Support is Perplexing

I am very sad to report that Perplexity.ai, my favorite hybrid AI search tool, is planning to sell ads. The company says it will focus on introducing "native ads" by allowing brands to influence the "related questions" feature, which accounts for 40% of Perplexity's queries. Continue Reading →