Perplexity Wants to Be the Last Website You Visit
On the last day of 2023, a search engine is handing out two free months and quietly betting it can end Google.
$20B valuation. 45 million monthly users. the aggregator play worked. then the lawsuits arrived — NYT, BBC, dow jones, reddit — and "eating the model costs" started including legal costs too.
Perplexity is running a promo — code Holidays23, two months free, expires tomorrow — which is either a confident flex or the most polite way a startup has ever said we need you to try this before the new year resets your attention span.
The deal is interesting, but the structure underneath it is the thing. You pay one fee. They handle the model costs. Underneath that single subscription sits GPT-4, Claude 2, Gemini Pro, a handful of OSS models over at labs.perplexity.ai, and some proprietary stuff they're calling experimental — which is the startup equivalent of a restaurant naming something "chef's surprise." You flip a setting. You get the model. They eat the bill.
This is the aggregator play, and it's a genuinely strange bet to make. The assumption is that people don't want to manage four subscriptions and four different browser tabs and four different mental models for when to use which thing. They want one box. They want an answer. Perplexity is selling the box and the answer at the same time, which means they're competing with both Google and OpenAI simultaneously, which is either visionary or delusional and probably both.
Google is apparently shaking. OpenAI apparently has Google shaking. Perplexity apparently thinks they can inherit the whole thing.
It's New Year's Eve. Three companies are in a staring contest over a search box. The OSS models are free and getting better on a timeline that nobody can predict. The promo code expires at midnight.
2024 is going to be completely normal.
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