The artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI has raised tens of millions of dollars from the likes of Jeff Bezos and other prominent tech investors for its mission to rival Google in the business of searching for information.
Randall Lane, chief content officer of Forbes Media, called the dispute an “inflection point” in the conversation about AI. “The whole thing was very disingenuous. And what we didn’t hear was, ‘Oops, yeah we messed that one up and we need to do better,’” he said. “Instead, it was just putting out more content, little tweaks to the model and treating journalism like it’s just a commodity to be manufactured.”
The company sells a subscription for premium features and is planning to start an advertising-based service as it grows its user base. She pointed to Google’s new, Perplexity-like approach that summarizes answers based on information pulled from crawling the web, as an example. That, too, led to false information and forced“But their whole model of advertising is based on sending people to websites,” she said in an email. “Why will people go to websites if they can have the one-stop-shop of the answer in the AI output?”
“There are whole companies or whole applications that are also doing this, where they are rolling out new services without fully thinking through the implications or best practices or safeguards because they’re rolling out applications for industries that maybe they’re not native to,” he said. Mother of the Bride's Dress Steals Spotlight, Internet Claims She Tried to Upstage Daughter: 'No Regrets' Donald Trump Chickens Out Of Head-To-Head Press Conferences With Joe Biden; Incumbent Campaign Mocks Ex-POTUS