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Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

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Re: Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

#11

Post by Esophagus4 »

Another example of Betteridge’s law:

> 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

Re: Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

#13

Post by y42 »

zaphar wrote: post #2

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.

Re: Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

#14

Post by [deleted] »

zaphar wrote: post #2

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.

[deleted]

Re: Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

#15

Post by y42 »

rs186 wrote: post #10
shalmanese wrote: post #4

Most AI written article that was ever AIed. It’s not just a laziness — it’s disrespect towards the reader.

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. This is an article I stumbled upon recently: https://medium.com/@saraswatp/understanding-scaled-dot-produ... Apparently the author did not bother to do basic proofreading of the article even once before posting it. Yet it showed up at the top of my Google…

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.

entshitification at its best...

Re: Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

#16

Post by Esophagus4 »

rs186 wrote: post #10
shalmanese wrote: post #4

Most AI written article that was ever AIed. It’s not just a laziness — it’s disrespect towards the reader.

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. This is an article I stumbled upon recently: https://medium.com/@saraswatp/understanding-scaled-dot-produ... Apparently the author did not bother to do basic proofreading of the article even once before posting it. Yet it showed up at the top of my Google…

The content beast just needs to be fed. Volume seems to be king.

Even this article is mostly just tech gossip, even if it were human generated.

Re: Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

#17

Post by AJ007 »

JCM9 wrote: post #5

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…

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.

Re: Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

#19

Post by brador »

rs186 wrote: post #6
zaphar wrote: post #2

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.

Their mobile app still seems to be usable so far.

Barely. It glitches out from too much mobile CSS nonsense half the time. And it doesn’t let you change model for follow up questions like it used to.

Re: Is Perplexity the first AI unicorn to fail?

#20

Post by nailer »

xnx wrote: post #18
nailer wrote: post #8

> Perplexity is increasingly looking like what Silicon Valley dreads most a wrapper. That is only uneducated people. The ‘wrapper’ is the product people pay for. The ‘wrapper’ gets all the revenue.

Wrappers are simple to copy, no moat.

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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