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• In Search of Something Better 🔍

In Search of Something Better 🔍

My lifetime basketball shooting percentage is probably 0.0002%, yet, I hereby challenge LeBron James to a 1:1 game of hoops.

That’s roughly the equivalent of any startup looking at Google’s search dominance and saying, “Sure, we can take ‘em.”

Enter Perplexity: An AI-Search startup founded in 2023 readying its shot at Google’s throne.

In case you didn’t notice, a thing called ‘AI’ has been all the rage since last year. There’s an AI for everything now.

But what about Search? 

Sure, there’s ChatGPT. But it’s got its issues with the knowledge cut-off date. And when it does stick around, it’s using Bing, which is … well, it’s Bing.

Google has Bard which is honestly meh at best. 

What you’re looking for is Perplexity. Their AI based search is the best we’ve come across until now.

Its answers are concise and to the point, it includes citations and best of all, it doesn’t have an overly cutesy, distracting personality!

Big Names and Big Money

If you’ve never heard of Perplexity, don’t be mistaken into thinking it’s just another startup. 

The head honcho? Aravind Srinivas, a veteran of OpenAI and DeepMind.

The money? The company recently raised a mammoth $100 million round from IVP at a $520 million valuation. 

Their investor list is definitely one to gawk at:

• NVIDIA

• Jeff Bezos

• Shopify CEO - Tobi Lutke

• Ex-Youtube CEO - Susan Wojcicki

• Ex-GitHub CEO - Nat Friedman

The company of course has a looong way to go. It makes only about $5M-$10M from subscriptions, but it boasts some pretty impressive usage statistics. 

They claim to have 10M monthly active users with 500M+ queries served. That obviously pales in comparison to Google ~8.5b searches daily, but hey, you gotta start somewhere right?

Check them out here → Perplexity.

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