The list of companies that have tried – and failed – to challenge Google is long, and getting started seems like a daunting task.
However, this does not stop Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. He invested his money in Perplexity AI, a startup that is waging the battle against the search giant.
Perplexity, founded in August 2022, aims to challenge Google by offering an AI-based search engine that is “part chatbot and part search engine, offering real-time information and footnotes explaining the sources of its answers,” according to a company report. Websites.
In January, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, shared a blog post saying that Perplexity's number of active users had grown to 10 million monthly users and served more than half a billion orders by 2023.
He also revealed that the company has raised $73.6 million from venture investors, companies like Nvidia, and several angel investors — as well as Jeff Bezos, through his Bezos Expeditions Fund.
The January funding round valued Perplexity at approximately $520 million.
Now, just a few months later, the company is finalizing a financing deal that values the company at about $1 billion, according to a report this week from The Wall Street Journal.
This means that Bezos' investment has nearly doubled in just a few months.
And he wasn't the only investor noticing the rapid growth Back in January. Perplexity is one of the few consumer AI products to have reached the milestone of 10 million users, according to Jonathan Cohen, a director at Nvidia.
Challenge the giants
Srinivas has made several criticisms of Google, which he believes has become boring.
Google will be seen as something old and outdated, and Google will be seen as something of the next generation and the future, he told Reuters in January.
Perplexity makes money by offering a Pro version for $20 per month that lets users choose from different major language models, including OpenAI's GPT-4, Anthropic's Claude 2.1, or the project's own LLM Perplexity.
-The value we offer to customers is that the free version is so good that you can use it without having to pay. But Srinivas told financial website Fortune that the paid version would be crazy.
He also expects people will increasingly turn to AI chatbots instead of Google when searching for things online.
“Time spent searching through SEO spam, sponsored links, and multiple websites will be replaced by a more efficient way of consuming and sharing information,” he wrote in the January announcement. “If you could answer a few questions directly, no one would need the 10 blue links.” “.
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