As a purely anecdotal datapoint, Perplexity was my first stop search engine for a while. It stopped being my first stop when they starting prompting me constantly to try their browser. Getting in the way of me being able to immediately ask my question drove over to gemini instead. It turned out that Gemini was good enough now so I didn't go back.
Stopped being my preferred search engine when my company, a big global agency, decided to block all traffic to perplexityity on the company device because they don't allow it's browser to be used. Hilarious.
Medium used to be a decent platform full of high quality articles. Then the quality started to drop. These days, it's full of AI slops, the ones with lower quality.
yeah, this is sad and it applies to most platforms who offer user generated content for money (or ad impressions).
Not only is the quality decreasing, also it hides actual content from writers that care and put work into their articles.
I’ve always been baffled by how far they were able to get being a straight wrapper. They’re doing incredible tbh.
There are so many wrappers. I feel like companies that are propped up by wrappers will always be competing against basic features being released by <insert AI company>. Wrappers also just feel low effort.
It’s hard to bet against the foundation models winning consumer use cases where you can reimagine the whole product as a single tool or small number that can be dynamically plugged in to the underlying model and doesn’t require access to proprietary data/custom context.
Perplexity is one small iteration away from just a classic AI wrapper.
It was amazing early on in demonstrating what search could be, but frankly there’s not much reason for it to exist much longer.
The big players can, and are, just replicating its core functionality. The moat is gone.
I’d have to agree that they’re probably near the top of the list of companies about to get wiped out by a bubble deflation. Possible they get acquired by some sucker looking to establish AI creds but the market for that has probably passed as Wall Street is becoming super skeptical of all things AI at the moment.
Perplexity had a big advantage over the competition when model hallucination was bad. That gap has narrowed enough for now.
Perplexity beats Google, ChatGPT, and Claude if you want an answer with citations and want it fast. Claude deep research is more thorough, but that's going to be a wait. ChatGPT web search is slower, uses few citations, and looks like more of the answer is coming from the model than the results. It's also possible that the quality and speed of Perplexity would vanish with scale and the only reason they look so good right now is because they have so many fewer users.
The mid to long term problems I see are:
#1 Google could cut them off from Youtube and a big chunk of their value is gone without recourse.
#2 over time the open web is going to shrivel and switch to paid or even die as ad revenue drops and bot traffic increases (already at this point probably, just countermeasures haven't been fully adopted.)
#3 goes with the previous point, more content is going to be AI generated and not fact checked which will dramatically drop the value of the output. This of course is a problem for all LLMs. Google may be the one who has a big advantage here given their advanced AI research and that they already have an index of the pre-LLM internet.
> Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no.
Perplexity is one of my first options for search (and superficial research) at this point.
They just signed a $400m deal with Snapchat. They’ll get acquired or something, worst case. They’ll be fine.
Edit: this might be an interesting case for Polymarket. Retail can’t be on or against private companies, but maybe a prediction market would be good for revealed preferences vs stated preferences here
The moat is the relationships and recurring payments are to the company that has the actual customers. Microsoft has the resources to fight Cursor, but they can't.
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