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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

#71

Post by matt_daemon »

fgblanch wrote: post #44

I don't know if it would come with the deal, but Bytedance web crawler is known to be the one with top number of requests per day among AI crawlers (src: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... ) I guess one of Perplexity challenges is to have their own web index and of course that starts with having a powerful crawler. Also having a powerful crawler is useful for capturing tokens to train mod…

Funnily enough the Cloudflare blog identifies Perplexity engaging in dodgy practices to avoid robots.txt denylists:

> Sadly, we’ve observed bot operators attempt to appear as though they are a real browser by using a spoofed user agent. We’ve monitored this activity over time, and we’re proud to say that our global machine learning model has always recognized this activity as a bot, even when operators lie about their user agent.

Clearly not working too well.

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#73

Post by amyames »

mjmsmith wrote: post #64
quantadev wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or due to their power, they've already secretly been taken over by the US Gov't. That's not really a "big conspiracy theory" at this point. I was mocked by the left for years for saying that the Gov't was involved in Facebook censorship. Turns out I was right. The biggest battle our Gov't has to wage is the battle for hearts and minds, and the control of information, and so they're trying to get in as deeply rooted a…

Are you referring to the firehose of covid misinformation spewed out of Facebook, or some other grift?

That’s the bulk of the “justifiable” censorship but if you dig into the [largely overrated] “Twitter files,” sometimes they even got mad about jokes.

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#74

Post by kumarm »

yogthos wrote: post #56

I'm not sure why people keep expecting ByteDance to actually sell TikTok. The US isn't even that big of a market for them in global terms. India was a bigger market for them, and it was way bigger than the US. They're just going to shut down in US and focus on BRICS countries instead.

Not all users are the same for Ad Revenue.

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#75

Post by handfuloflight »

thatguymike wrote: post #43
handfuloflight wrote: post #29

Obvious PR move, they don't have near enough money.

They’re suggesting a merger, not a sale.

The point still stands, they don't have enough of a relative valuation to even be considered serious and a balance sheet that would be a rounding error to ByteDance.

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#77

Post by quantadev »

mjmsmith wrote: post #64
quantadev wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or due to their power, they've already secretly been taken over by the US Gov't. That's not really a "big conspiracy theory" at this point. I was mocked by the left for years for saying that the Gov't was involved in Facebook censorship. Turns out I was right. The biggest battle our Gov't has to wage is the battle for hearts and minds, and the control of information, and so they're trying to get in as deeply rooted a…

Are you referring to the firehose of covid misinformation spewed out of Facebook, or some other grift?

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, for moderating/controlling the public, so he was the ring-leader of all the censorship, for about a decade.

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#78

Post by anon373839 »

paxys wrote: post #51
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 is useful as a thin layer of product over a base model. As Sam Altman said, eventually all such startups will be steamrolled by companies that own the models.

Sam Altman is not a credible figure, and that quote was rubbish IMO. There’s no inherent reason that foundation model trainers (the dumb pipes of the AI era) will win RAG by default. Apps like Perplexity aren’t even really constrained by the strength of the model. The secret sauce is the information retrieval, where OpenAI has no special advantage. But Google sure does…

Re: Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

#79

Post by yogthos »

kumarm wrote: post #74
yogthos wrote: post #56

I'm not sure why people keep expecting ByteDance to actually sell TikTok. The US isn't even that big of a market for them in global terms. India was a bigger market for them, and it was way bigger than the US. They're just going to shut down in US and focus on BRICS countries instead.

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.
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