Share This Article
Perplexity AI released a search engine that could become a competitor to Google
The American company Perplexity AI raised US$26 million in a funding round. The project is developing a search engine based on artificial intelligence.
Investors’ interest in the young company, which was only founded in 2022, is due to the growing demand for products and developments in AI. In addition, Perplexity AI has every chance of becoming a worthy competitor to the Google search engine. The latter is the most popular search engine in the world. The fact that there are programmers among its investors who work on artificial intelligence technologies at Google also attests to the potential of the Perplexity startup.
The startup’s search model is new to the market. When a user enters a query into Perplexity, the system provides them with a ready-made answer generated by the AI based on an analysis of various sources on that topic. Initially, the search was available on the company’s website. After the startup evaluated the traffic and found that most of it came from mobile devices, it released an app for iOS.
The company’s development has interested many well-known personalities in the IT sphere, such as Yann LeCun, who develops the AI direction at Meta Corporation. AI developers from Google and its subsidiary DeepMind also invested in the new project. Moreover, one of the top managers of the technological giant acted as a business angel for Perplexity. He invested in the startup at the early stage of its operations.
New project features
The dialogue-type search engine was launched in December 2022. And since then, new additions to the service have been released regularly. According to Nat Friedman, who previously held a leadership position at GitHub, the Perplexity startup has released more products in just six months of operation than some companies have in their entire existence.
Although the number of users of the new search engine is significantly inferior to Google’s audience, it is rapidly gaining popularity. For example, in just one month of operation, the number of visitors to Perplexity has more than doubled. In February, 13 million people used the service.
Over the past year, several AI-based services considered alternatives to Google’s search engine have emerged globally. The most striking discovery was the ChatGPT chatbot, released by the startup OpenAI in October 2022. These market trends encourage Google to speed up work on its artificial intelligence model. The corporation has been developing it for several years. The corporation is also inspired by the fact that Perplexity employs former employees who were involved in AI research. For example, Aravind Srinivas, previously on the staff of DeepMind and Google Brain, holds the post of executive director at the startup.