A new AI -dear one makes waves in Silicon Valley. It is called perplexity, and according to reports, Meta and Apple quietly explored acquiring it. Estimated at an incessant $ 14 billion after a financial circle of May, the startup is hailed as a revolutionary threat to Google Search’s search.
But here’s the thing: it mostly only summarizes online results and sends you links.
So why is the madness?
Perplexity billed to itself a “corresponding engine.” You ask a question, and it uses large language models to spit a human-sounding summary, complete with footnotes. It is essentially chatter with bibliography. You may ask for the best books on the French Revolution or the Break of Genius Law. In seconds, it generates a paragraph with links to Wikipedia, news, or Reddit threads.
Its pitch is a cleaner, advertising-free, chat-driven search experience. No SEO rubbish, no move.
But critics say it is little more than a glorified envelope around Google and Openai’s APIs, with minimal own Techniko and a lot of smoke. It’s fast, clean and smooth. But, they argue, at its core, it mostly only reorganizes the Internet.
Obsession of a great technique
That didn’t stop the Hype. In May 2025, the San Francisco based company, California closed another $ 500 million financial round, pushing its estimate to $ 14 billion, a sharp increase in its $ 9 billion in December 2024. Jeff Bezos, through Jeff Bezos family, and Nvidia are among its notable Backers.
And now, tech giants are around. According to Bloomberg, Apple supported words of gaining perplexity. Meta also reportedly considered the movement, although no formal offers were confirmed.
The logic is clear. Perplexity is growing rapidly and increasingly seen as a “Google killer”, especially among technological influencers and X-power users. Traffic to its website has exploded in recent months. The company now offers a Chrome extension, mobile app, and a professional version that gives users access to highest AI models like GPT-4 and Claude.
However, it is unclear what exactly does perplexity worth $ 14 billionIn addition to the fact that it rides the ai -wave.
Why ai -skeptics roll their eyes
For ai -skeptics, the rise of perplexity is yet another example of a hype -above substance. The site does not train its own models. It does not build a new infrastructure. It does not revolutionize search. It only offers a polished interface to ask questions and get summaries of AI-generated from public websites.
There are also concerns about how perplexity stems its information. Several news organizations, including The New York Times, Forbes, and Wired, have accused the content of plagiarism and scraping content without permission or proper allocation. Ist journalists and publishers warn that this kind of AI-powered search experience threatens to cannibalize news traffic as they return little to creators of content.
On June 20, the BBC became the latest exit to threaten legal action against perplexity AI, advocating that the company uses BBC content to train its “default AI model”, according to The Financial Times.
Aravind Srinivas, Director General of Perplexity, defended the company as “an aggregate of information.” In July 2024, the startup launched Income program to deal with the counterattack. “We always believed that we can build a system where the whole internet wins,” Srinivas said at the time.
So why is gold speed?
Simple. Search is money. Google earned $ 50.7 billion from search announcements in the first quarter, 9.8% increased year a year. If perplexity can convince even a small share of users to change, and then monitor that experience, it becomes a real threat. Apple and Meta, both are increasingly concerned about relying on Google, see perplexity as a quick way in AI’s search race.
But the stakes go even deeper. Whoever controls the following search interface controls the user. Just as Google replaced Yahoo, perplexity could theoretically replace Google. That’s why Big Tech wants to get in, even if it’s not quite clear what they buy.
