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.

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

It’s hard to bet against the foundation models winning consumer use cases where you can reimagine the whole product as a single tool or small number that can be dynamically plugged in to the underlying model and doesn’t require access to proprietary data/custom context.

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 they get acquired by some sucker looking to establish AI creds but the market for that has probably passed as Wall Street is becoming super skeptical of all things AI at the moment.

I’ve always been baffled by how far they were able to get being a straight wrapper. They’re doing incredible tbh.

There are so many wrappers. I feel like companies that are propped up by wrappers will always be competing against basic features being released by <insert AI company>. Wrappers also just feel low effort.

That mirrors my impression - their customer base is the equivalent of fair weather friends (VC money edition)

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

> 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.