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 compete with Google in information search.
But its AI-powered search chatbot is already facing challenges as some news media companies object to its business practices technology giants Google, and now appleare increasingly integrating similar AI features into their core products.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has spent much of the past week defending the company after it published a summarized news story with information and similar wording to a Forbes investigative story, but without citing the media or seeking permission. said Forbes It later discovered similar “knock-off” stories taken from other publications.
The Associated Press separately uncovered another part of the Perplexity product that concocted false quotes from real people, including a former elected town official of Martha’s Vineyard who was falsely quoted as saying he did not want the island to become Massachusetts a destination for marijuana.
“I never said that,” said Bill Rossi, a former member of the board of the island town of Chilmark.
Srinivas told The Associated Press that his company seeks to build positive relationships with news publishers that ensure their news content “reaches more people.”
“We can definitely coexist and help each other,” he said.
When asked by Forbes, he said his product “has never ripped off content from anyone. Our engine doesn’t train on anyone else’s content,” in part because the company simply aggregates what other companies’ AI systems generate.
“We are actually more of an aggregator of information and providing it to the people with proper attribution,” Srinivas said. But, he added, “Forbes rightly pointed out that they preferred more prominent credit to the source. We immediately took that feedback and updated the changes that day. And now the sources are highlighted more prominently.”
Perplexity also revealed this week that it is seeking revenue-sharing partnerships, in which news publishers would pay a portion of Perplexity’s advertising revenue every time an outlet’s news content is referenced as a source.
Randall Lane, chief content officer of Forbes Media, called the dispute a “watershed moment” in the conversation about AI.
“It’s a case study of where we’re going,” Lane told the AP. “If the people in charge don’t have a fundamental respect for the hard work of doing our own reporting and keeping people informed with value-added content, we have a big problem.”
A self-described “AI bull” who believes the technology can make many news organizations more efficient. Lane said the dispute between Perplexity and Forbes is important because it is a “metaphor for what could happen if the people who control the AI “have no respect for the people who do the work.”
Perplexity bills itself as a search engine while “acting like a media company and publishing a story” that only Forbes had reported, Lane said.
“It was all very unfair. And what we didn’t hear was, ‘Oops, yeah, we messed up and we need to do better,’” he said. “Instead, it just put out more content, made minor tweaks to the model and treated journalism as if it were just a product to be produced.”
Srinivas, a computer scientist and former AI researcher at OpenAI and Google, co-founded Perplexity in the summer of 2022, not long before the AI image generator Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s ChatGPT began to spark the public’s fascination with the possibilities of generative AI .
Inspired in part by his childhood love of Wikipedia, he described Perplexity to the AP as “a marriage between Wikipedia and ChatGPT” that can instantly answer anyone’s questions without the “huge cluttered mess” of conventional Google search results.
“You ask a question, you get a clean source answer, and there are three or four suggested (follow-up) questions and that’s it,” he said of Perplexity. “That way, people’s minds can be free of distractions, and they can just focus on learning and digging deeper.”
The company is selling a subscription for premium features and plans to launch an ad-based service as its user base grows.
“We are not profitable as a company today, but we are also run more sustainably than foundation model companies because we don’t train our own foundation models,” which requires enormous amounts of computing power, he said.
Perplexity relies on existing AI major language models such as those built by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms, Facebook’s parent company; and then ‘post-train’ them.
“We make sure they are really good summaries,” he said.
It is not always clear where the summarized information comes from. One Perplexity feature called Writing – which allows a user to “generate text or chat without searching the web” – produces lengthy and unsourced commentary, often in the style of a news article. Tests of the function by an AP reporter with the request to write about it the lack of marijuana on Martha’s Vineyard led to it producing a 465-word document that resembled a news article and contained fabricated quotes from the former city official and another real person.
The AP does not repeat the false quotes to prevent misinformation from being perpetuated. Srinivas said Perplexity’s writing feature is a “minor use case” intended to help with writing essays or correcting grammar when primary source information is not needed. He said it is “more prone to hallucinations” – a common problem with AI large language models – because it is not linked to the web search capabilities of Perplexity’s core product.
“There is no doubt that generative AI is revolutionizing journalism, content creation and search,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University’s Tech Policy Institute.
As an example, she pointed to Google’s new Perplexity-like approach, which summarizes answers based on information gleaned from crawling the web. That also led to false information and was forced Google to make adjustments to the product after its public release.
“But their entire advertising model is based on sending people to websites,” she said in an email. “Why do people go to websites when they can have the one-stop shop for the answer in the AI output?”
Srinivas claimed to the AP that “a lot of people are getting referrals from Perplexity, and I’m happy that they’re getting referrals from a new player on the internet.”
For now, much of that benefit may be aspirational. Perplexity’s global user base has grown rapidly this year to more than 85 million web visits in May, but that barely registers compared to the billions of users of ChatGPT and other popular platforms from Microsoft and Google, according to data from Similarweb.
The debate highlights the “uncertain and challenging times” for online content creators in general and for journalism in particular, because aggregators only work when publications like Forbes exist, said Stephen Lind, associate professor at Marshall School of Business the University of Southern California.
Using AI as a synthesizing tool allows for widespread dissemination of information until “you without originals,” he said.
“There are entire companies or entire applications that do this too, rolling out new services without really thinking through the implications, best practices or safeguards, because they are rolling out applications for industries that they may not be native to. ” he said.
Lind said it’s good that companies like Perplexity are “at least taking some steps to course-correct when an industry or a user pulls out.” But some changes should have been baked in from the start, he added.
