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Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

techcrunch.com

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Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#101

Post by quantadev »

bdangubic wrote: post #86
quantadev wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear I wasn't blaming just the Gov't for all the censorship, because 99% of Facebook employees (including Zuck himself) were strongly in favor of censoring all conservative viewpoints, as well, and were in lock-step with Big Gov't controlling speech. Zuck recently tried to blame it all on the FEDs (on JRE podcast) but he was obviously lying because Facebook even built a special portal for the FEDs to log into,…

my God what social media does to people to write and believe stuff like this… hopefully one day everything will be banned… amazing to read this - just amazing what seemingly normal human being can be made into believing!

Aw, Silicon Valley doesn't want everything banned. They just want all ideas that go against their world view banned. lol.

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#102

Post by startup-student »

Yawrehto wrote: post #91

There are different types of merge. There's the 'look at it! It just makes sense !' type. There's the 'we wanted to do this thing but you're already doing it' merge. There's the 'let's be a monopoly!' merge, and its sibling, 'you are getting in the way of my aspirations to be a monopoly' merge. There's the quiet merge to deal with debts, the making-it-formal-but-functionally-we-were-already-merged, the hey-that-colla…

lol what a great way to describe it

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#103

Post by quantadev »

jeromegv wrote: post #83
quantadev wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be clear I wasn't blaming just the Gov't for all the censorship, because 99% of Facebook employees (including Zuck himself) were strongly in favor of censoring all conservative viewpoints, as well, and were in lock-step with Big Gov't controlling speech. Zuck recently tried to blame it all on the FEDs (on JRE podcast) but he was obviously lying because Facebook even built a special portal for the FEDs to log into,…

And yet Twitter is censoring progressive viewpoints and even skewed the algo toward promoting a certain political candidate and yet not a single word from those free speech warriors. https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endo...

I'm generally in favor of Free Speech, but after Silicon Valley censored conservatives for a decade, during the entire Cancel Culture era, I think for them (liberals) to get to experience what it feels like to be censored themselves is probably a good thing. A good learning experience for them to begin to understand first hand how it feels, and what they did to others, without remorse, and with ill intent, for a decade.

So I say to all liberals complaining about Twitter censorship: "Turnabout is fair play" and "You deserve it, because you invented it."

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#104

Post by startup-student »

dtagames wrote: post #96
vinni2 wrote: post #6

Perplexity sounds desperate. They got early traction and have money but they seem to be lost.

A few days ago they were talking about making a browser. Smells like it's over for their original business plan. Maybe.

Merge with Arc at that point

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#107

Post by visarga »

mcmcmc wrote: post #48
kissgyorgy wrote: post #20

It's a shame because Perplexity is BY FAR the most useful AI tool out there. This shows they have clearly no vision and won't be able to keep afloat.

Perplexity are also flagrant copyright violators

Because they summarize and cite sources or because their models were trained on copyrighted materials? Summarization and training should be tranformative, and the user questions add that element of novel purpose to the original materials that should make the output non derivative. But most of their responses are one time use, nobody is ever returning to them.

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#109

Post by mmiyer »

yogthos wrote: post #79
kumarm wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not all users are the same for Ad Revenue.

That's true, but the sheer volume of users outside the US more than makes up for that.

I don't know about that - seems like US is close to half of Tiktok revenue: "TikTok took in an estimated $10 billion in revenue in the United States last year, he said, out of a total global revenue estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion." [1]

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/technology/tiktok-ban-byt...

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#110

Post by nemothekid »

benreesman wrote: post #95
janderson215 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to buy a Ferrari F550 but the salesman kicked me out when I offered him $300. $500M is nothing to sneeze at, but that is like 3 orders of magnitude less than TikTok’s value.

I don’t doubt TikTok is wildly valuable. Is it really that high? I know tech valuations at this point basically price in compulsory use of their products, but that’s pretty stiff even by contemporary standards right? Top hit [1] says $200 billion, which is little more believable, but unlike Meta, TikTok has real competition across its entire surface, Meta can leverage its other monopolies and I’m not sure TikTok will…

TikTok reported 16B in revenue in 2023. In the same period SNAP reported 4B in revenue. You could conservatively say TikTok is worth 80B from that metric alone.

>I’m not sure TikTok will be the first social network ever to avoid being encircled, outlasted, and strangled by Menlo Park.

TikTok’s growth has been massive - but you may be right only because Meta decided to get the teacher to change the rules; not because Meta was able to out execute TikTok

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