Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, is making a new bet on the wave of artificial intelligence (AI) with his investment in Perplexity, an AI-based search engine set to challenge Google. Perplexity, founded in August 2022, aims to offer a unique user experience by blending chatbot capabilities with search engine functionality. It provides real-time information and includes footnotes showing the sources of its answers. Despite not yet being profitable, Perplexity has quickly gained traction, boasting 10 million monthly active users and over a million installations of its mobile apps on iOS and Android platforms. The startup claims to have served over half a billion queries last year.
On Thursday, Perplexity announced that it raised $73.6 million in funding from a group of investors led by venture capital firm IVP, including Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, and Shopify co-founder Tobias Lütke. This funding round values Perplexity at approximately $520 million. Perplexity’s success in reaching 10 million monthly active users is seen as a significant achievement by industry experts, who believe that AI will revolutionize the way people access information.
Perplexity’s CEO, Avarind Srinivas, a former researcher at OpenAI, boldly stated that he believes Google will be viewed as legacy and old in the face of Perplexity’s next-generation AI search engine. Srinivas envisions a future where people rely less on traditional search engines and more on AI chatbots for information retrieval.
While Perplexity undoubtedly has a long way to go to compete with Google’s dominant market share, this investment signals a growing interest among major tech investors in challenging the search giant. Microsoft has also incorporated OpenAI’s ChatGPT-4 into its Bing search engine, further highlighting the growing influence of AI in the search industry.
Jeff Bezos’ investment in Perplexity echoes his previous successful bet on the potential of the internet when he founded Amazon in 1997. Now, Bezos is placing his bet on AI, confident that Perplexity will ride this wave well. As the future of search and information retrieval evolves, only time will tell if Perplexity becomes a true contender to Google’s throne.
(Source: Adapted from original article)
The source of the article is from the blog papodemusica.com