Founded in August 2022, the startup known as Perplexity 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 showing the sources of its answers,” according to its website.
When deciding to invest, Bezos was no doubt looking at the numbers, as he did in the 1990s. Perplexity, while still not profitable, has quickly grown to 10 million monthly active users while almost entirely skipping traditional marketing, according to the company. It further claims that more than a million people have installed its mobile apps on the iOS and Android platforms, and it served over half a billion queries last year.
On Thursday, San Francisco–based Perplexity announced that it has raised $73.6 million from a group of investors led by venture capital firm IVP and including Bezos, the $1.2 trillion AI chip giant Nvidia, and Shopify cofounder Tobias Lütke.
Perplexity is “one of the few consumer AI products to reach this major milestone of 10 million MAUs,” said Jonathan Cohen, VP of Applied Research at Nvidia, in the announcement. AI will “transform how we access information,” he believes.
Not until they solve the problem of LLMs just making stuff up, plus the perhaps more intractable problem of generative AIs generating garbage-out that gets used as garbage-in for generative AIs generating even stinkier garbage.