Perplexity AI: has Google finally met its match?

Google dominates the search engine sphere to such an extent it’s hard to imagine it ever being usurped. But the battle that AI search engines are taking to the web giant is a “tantalising face-off”, a bit like “Martin Luther taking on the Catholic church”, said one commentator.

Starting a new search business has “always been a nearly impossible hill to climb”, said Digiday, because you are “invariably up against” the “Mt. Everest” of Google. But is Perplexity AI about to reach that peak? 

What is the new product?

The man behind the new tool is Aravind Srinivas. After interning at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, both of which became leaders in generative artificial intelligence, Srinivas co-founded Perplexity, a start-up valued at $1 billion that provides fast, Wikipedia-like responses to search queries. So it’s “bye bye” to the “10 blue links” of Google, said The Verge and “hello direct answers to all my weird questions about the world”.

It has several advantages. By “gleaning answers from a variety of large language models, both closed and open-source”, said The Economist, Perplexity AI “can take advantage of each model’s analytical strengths”, as well as “their varying pricing structures”, to “improve performance and lower costs”.

What do the experts say?

Srinivas has “openly thrown down the gauntlet to Google”, added The Economist, because “upstarts are supposed to win over underserved customers with cheap, scrappy technology”. But Perplexity, with a subscription model that may eventually include ads, “can be more expensive than Google and its answers tend to be far more polished (if not always accurate)”.

But the “thing you have to understand about a search engine”, said The Verge, “is that a search engine is many things”. People use Google to “find important and hard-to-access scientific information”, to “find their email inbox, get to Walmart’s website, or remember who was president before Hoover”. Some people even type ‘google’ into Google.

In other words, although we “mostly talk” about Google as a research tool, “in reality, it’s asked to do anything and everything you can think of, billions of times a day”. So “the real question in front of all these would-be Google killers” is “not how well they can find information” but “how well they can do everything Google does”.

Google has not built its “Mt. Everest” stature lightly. Alphabet, the owner of the search engine, has the “researchers and deep pockets” to keep improving generative AI search and the computing costs of queries have fallen by 80% since they were first introduced, said The Economist. “In short,’ Google “does not appear to face a dilemma at present”.

So, although the “10 blue links” of Google “isn’t the answer for search”, neither is “an all-purpose text box”, said The Verge. “Search is everything, and everything is search”, so “it’s going to take a lot more than a chatbot to kill Google”.

Nevertheless, many companies hope to make just that kill and the race to do so promises to be an entertaining one. It is a “given” that AI can “help search engines understand questions and process information better”, says The Verge, but “can Google reinvent its results pages, its business model, and the way it presents and summarizes and surfaces information, faster than the AI companies can turn their chatbots into more complex, more multifaceted tools?”