There's the 'look at it! It just makes sense!' type. There's the 'we wanted to do this thing but you're already doing it' merge. There's the 'let's be a monopoly!' merge, and its sibling, 'you are getting in the way of my aspirations to be a monopoly' merge. There's the quiet merge to deal with debts, the making-it-formal-but-functionally-we-were-already-merged, the hey-that-collaboration-went-well merge, and many more.
I am still holding out hope for the Drumstick-TikTok Merger. We need more humor these days and i'd really love to see someone like Drumstick take it over lol
I think it is more of, holy shit, OpenAI is entering this space, and maybe Anthropic as well. What can we compete with:
- Name? No
- Technology? No because we rely on other LLMs
Do we have anything? No. We've taken in a lot of money from big-name investors, so let's see if we can turn ourselves into a complementary asset before people realize that LLMs are nowhere near what they are sold as.
I think Perplexity just wants to stay in the news cycle and get more than it's fair share of discussion.
This is obviously not going to happen, and it's absurd anyone's really engaging with it as a serious proposition. But, because they have a new cycle behind it a lot more people are talking about Perplexity than Claude etc.
If you're using the term "value" to refer to monetary value, yes. If you're using it to refer to some other kind of value, it probably isn't relevant to the viability of the proposed merge.
The training data is an absurd moat for a mega social network, that’s why you save everything forever: the machine learning architecture to exploit it hasn’t even been invented yet and you have longitudinal dissensions all but impossible to get otherwise.
Voice, video, sentiment, ads stuff. With today’s technology you know if a user is about to get cheated on before they do.
Electricians showing bench demonstrations of what symptoms faulty neutrals cause, machinists doing step-by-step demonstrations of making tooling, including their fuckups, scrapyards doing deep dives into the in-practice economics of when and why they buy and sell, lawyers giving explanations of the laws involved in popular viral accident videos, baking recipes, comedians showing their material, musicians demonstrating techniques, etc
I don’t doubt TikTok is wildly valuable. Is it really that high? I know tech valuations at this point basically price in compulsory use of their products, but that’s pretty stiff even by contemporary standards right?
Top hit [1] says $200 billion, which is little more believable, but unlike Meta, TikTok has real competition across its entire surface, Meta can leverage its other monopolies and I’m not sure TikTok will be the first social network ever to avoid being encircled, outlasted, and strangled by Menlo Park.
> I don’t doubt TikTok is wildly valuable. Is it really that high?
I think TikTok is currently in the too valuable to measure state. It can literally be used (and some say it has already been used) to drastically influence politics in other countries.
The revenue generated is literally nothing at this stage in my opinion. China would be more than happy to spend billions at a loss if it means it can keep the same reach.
TikTok reported 16B in revenue in 2023. In the same period SNAP reported 4B in revenue. You could conservatively say TikTok is worth 80B from that metric alone.
>I’m not sure TikTok will be the first social network ever to avoid being encircled, outlasted, and strangled by Menlo Park.
TikTok’s growth has been massive - but you may be right only because Meta decided to get the teacher to change the rules; not because Meta was able to out execute TikTok
I would have agreed up until a few weeks ago. ChatGPT search is getting better, but kind of superficial so I still preferred Perplexity. But the new Gemini Deep Research is waaay better than Perplexity at deeper Internet searches and I imagine only will continue to get better.
Perplexity is useful as a thin layer of product over a base model. As Sam Altman said, eventually all such startups will be steamrolled by companies that own the models.
Sam Altman is not a credible figure, and that quote was rubbish IMO. There’s no inherent reason that foundation model trainers (the dumb pipes of the AI era) will win RAG by default. Apps like Perplexity aren’t even really constrained by the strength of the model. The secret sauce is the information retrieval, where OpenAI has no special advantage. But Google sure does…
He might say that, but I think in fact the opposite is true. The models are getting commodified. The real value lies in distribution (access to customers) and consumer product skills.
Yeah, but the distributers are always depend on the models. And they'll have to pay their licenses. And the ones who control the model have quite an influence on all of us.
I have been using / fanboi'ing Perplexity since January 2022; overall, I am disappointed in the direction their product has been heading. While it is still the first URL I visit when I want apprentice-level help, I don't think this will be true for much longer.
If anybody at perplexity wants my more-direct feedback (beyond what I've submitted via your platform's conversations), my postal is listed in /hn/bio (I do not use email, so if your platform eventually `requires` this it's an immediate disusership from me dawg).
Not OP but it used to be that if you wanted an LLM that would cite its sources - Perplexity was one of the only games in town that did a really good job combining an LLM with an active search engine.
It was also much better for posing questions that required the most up-to-date knowledge.
It starts with a search and reasoning from there. Cites the sources in the middle of the sentences so you can just click and verify, see the whole context.
It blows every "model only" service because it's 100x more accurate.
Because they summarize and cite sources or because their models were trained on copyrighted materials? Summarization and training should be tranformative, and the user questions add that element of novel purpose to the original materials that should make the output non derivative. But most of their responses are one time use, nobody is ever returning to them.
Or due to their power, they've already secretly been taken over by the US Gov't. That's not really a "big conspiracy theory" at this point. I was mocked by the left for years for saying that the Gov't was involved in Facebook censorship. Turns out I was right. The biggest battle our Gov't has to wage is the battle for hearts and minds, and the control of information, and so they're trying to get in as deeply rooted as possible with every big AI company.
To be clear I wasn't blaming just the Gov't for all the censorship, because 99% of Facebook employees (including Zuck himself) were strongly in favor of censoring all conservative viewpoints, as well, and were in lock-step with Big Gov't controlling speech.
Zuck recently tried to blame it all on the FEDs (on JRE podcast) but he was obviously lying because Facebook even built a special portal for the FEDs to log into, for moderating/controlling the public, so he was the ring-leader of all the censorship, for about a decade.
my God what social media does to people to write and believe stuff like this… hopefully one day everything will be banned… amazing to read this - just amazing what seemingly normal human being can be made into believing!
99% of Facebook employees (including Zuck himself) were strongly in favor of censoring all conservative viewpoints, as well, and were in lock-step with Big Gov't controlling speech.
how can you write this with the straight face when top like 100 accounts spreading shit on Facebook are right-wing nutcases. Give me on popular left-wing nutcase on Facebook?! believing that conservative views on any social media platform were ever being supressed is downright craaaaazy :)
Sorry dude. Nobody believes any of that in 2025. The claim that conservatives weren't being singled out on Social Media is laughable nowadays. All the companies have ADMITTED doing it. The Gov't has ADMITTED doing it.
I mean, conservatives were getting censored/attacked even for true things like saying COVID might have leaked from a lab, that there are only two sexes, that Hunter Laptop was real, that FBI lied on FISA warrant, that people meds are have horse-versions of them, Biden is senile, and on and on and on for countless other things.
And yet Twitter is censoring progressive viewpoints and even skewed the algo toward promoting a certain political candidate and yet not a single word from those free speech warriors.
I'm generally in favor of Free Speech, but after Silicon Valley censored conservatives for a decade, during the entire Cancel Culture era, I think for them (liberals) to get to experience what it feels like to be censored themselves is probably a good thing. A good learning experience for them to begin to understand first hand how it feels, and what they did to others, without remorse, and with ill intent, for a decade.
So I say to all liberals complaining about Twitter censorship: "Turnabout is fair play" and "You deserve it, because you invented it."
Every Democrat in the DC Swamp is quaking in their boots right now out of fear that the Republicans might do to them what they did to the Republicans. They expect it to happen, because being so revenge-oriented themselves, they know it's what they'd do.
The difference is that, unlike liberals, Conservatives (especially MAGA) are God-fearing law-and-order abiding people, not motivated by hate, and not the evildoers that they were falsely accused of being, by the insane left and their Senile POTUS, for the past 8 years.
So don't worry, Democrats have nothing to fear but the exposing of their hypocrisy, and more loss of reputation as more truths come out.
I don't know if it would come with the deal, but Bytedance web crawler is known to be the one with top number of requests per day among AI crawlers (src: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... ) I guess one of Perplexity challenges is to have their own web index and of course that starts with having a powerful crawler. Also having a powerful crawler is useful for capturing tokens to train models. If that technology comes with the deal, it makes perfect sense for Perplexity to acquire them.
Funnily enough the Cloudflare blog identifies Perplexity engaging in dodgy practices to avoid robots.txt denylists:
> Sadly, we’ve observed bot operators attempt to appear as though they are a real browser by using a spoofed user agent. We’ve monitored this activity over time, and we’re proud to say that our global machine learning model has always recognized this activity as a bot, even when operators lie about their user agent.
Lol, I had to report Facebook using the documented Facebook crawler UA, coming from Facebook ASN as a bot to them because they misclassified it. Don't expect too much from their global machine. I wonder if this case also included people manually reporting it...
Perplexity is a pretty awesome and much needed app, but Aravind Srinivas has many posts on X reek of a desperate need to succeed - scruples aside. To me that signals an inevitable enshitification.
twitter is fantastic man. it's great. i do miss hearing from (liberal) people who for whatever reason can't stomach people not agreeing with them. i hope they come around. like why does steven king care? i like his books, just talk about the books/his life. i never cared about his politics either way. if you can't separate your life from politics ughhh he's supposed to be smart. sad so many smart liberal people act like all the people i grew up with in church.
I'm not sure why people keep expecting ByteDance to actually sell TikTok. The US isn't even that big of a market for them in global terms. India was a bigger market for them, and it was way bigger than the US. They're just going to shut down in US and focus on BRICS countries instead.
I don't know about that - seems like US is close to half of Tiktok revenue: "TikTok took in an estimated $10 billion in revenue in the United States last year, he said, out of a total global revenue estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion." [1]
US market isn't likely to grow much going forward though, while developing countries have a lot of growth potential. Meanwhile, TikTok is bringing in at least 10bln annually already. Pure profit isn't the only thing that makes it valuable though, it's one of the few global media platforms that's not owned by the US.
Kmart bought Sears (back when Sears was far from worthless, and Kmart was fresh off a chapter 11) with nothing but its own overvalued stock, which was based on an inflated valuation of its real estate from a couple of very favorable sales. Point being, don’t rule out financial shenanigans if people who know what they’re doing are involved. (Note: I know nothing about who runs Perplexity)
That doesn't really help here. TikTok is at an absolute minimum an order of magnitude more valuable than Perplexity, more likely two orders of magnitude. If ownership of NewCo was even roughly proportional to the market value each side is bringing, the ownership structure doesn't meaningfully change compared to TikTok.
And when the ownership structure is the problem, it's obvious that this deal structured as a merger would solve nothing. They'd need to bring a couple of hundred billion to the table; and then we're back to this being just embarrassing, because obviously the money isn't there.
> TikTok is at an absolute minimum an order of magnitude more valuable than Perplexity, more likely two orders of magnitude
They don't need to buy TikTok, they need to buy out Bytedance.
If I had to structure it, I'd have Bytedance spin out TikTook to its U.S. shareholders and then arrange for Perplexity to buy enough of Bytedance's share that Bytedance holds a 49% (non-voting) interest.
> Bytedance without TikTok is still an order of magnitude worth more than Perplexity
They’re not buying Bytedance - TikTok, they’d be buying half of the piece of TikTok Bytedance would own after spinning it out to its non-Chinese shareholders.
The point still stands, they don't have enough of a relative valuation to even be considered serious and a balance sheet that would be a rounding error to ByteDance.
Aravind Srinivas is very ambitious but also smart of course.
TikTok has got to be an absolute gold mine for AI video training because of its short duration format and the amount of videos.
And AI videos seem primed to absolutely explode in popularity and consumption. I don't have access to Veo 2 yet, but Kling 1.6 is pretty amazing, even if it's prompt understanding is a bit random.
I wonder what the TikTok terms of use say about this.
I am probably just a hopeless conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if this just comes down to the NSA getting full access to the code and operations for auditing purposes or if they decide they have their own agenda.
I know that propaganda is a real thing, not a made up conspiracy theory, and companies like TikTok and Perplexity could be key to spreading/controlling it.
In particular, it's difficult to run a war if almost everyone in your country is against it. Which might happen pretty quickly if the wrong video spreads.
Maybe the solution to avoiding WWIII is for the (evil?) military industrial complex bosses in the west and China to get together and realize that they can more effectively surveil and control their populations if they work together. And then they can sell their weapons for purposes of persecuting smaller nations or groups that get out of line. And use the combined power of the monopoly information distribution companies in both countries to propagandize the world.
There you go, I just solved world peace. You're welcome.
I see the demand for being able to produce content with 0 effort, but where is the demand to consume it coming from? I thought people watch tiktoks to interact with people, the desire to engage with nonhuman personalities must be extremely niche, but could be I’m in a millennial/luddite bubble.
That's a good point but there is also a lot more passive consumption than actual interaction.
Also, AI video's IQ is generally pretty low now, but it still has the capacity to create very tailored experiences, such as with AI influencers automatically responding to every single comment from any viewer that donates X dollars. The are limitations to the digital avatars and video generation etc., but they are already very engaging. And in the next 1-3 years they will get much better.
Where we are headed in possibly 2-5 years is the expectation for many people that the personalities, activities, videos in general are completely customized for them or for the communities they are in. And change immediately based on their whims (or constrained by more realistic humanlike reactions if desired).
LTX video can be fine-tuned to produce a consistent character and runs at realtime frame rates. It is a tiny 2b model and it's understanding of prompts and the world is garbage because of that, but hardware and models keep getting much much better.
Before investing billions in individually curated, generated influencers and content creators, maybe we should market test it first and see if it's what anybody actually wants, let alone whether it's even achievable in any meaningful way.
A lot of AI people make strong assumptions about what the consumer market demand is for explicitly (as in, not "tricking" the user) AI generated art, music and content.
The fundamental issue is extremely pro-AI people do not respect any creative endeavor at all, and therefore all of this is unknowable to them. They don't know why people are interested in art or why people want to make art; movies, images, music, any form of creative expression; they simply know that people are interested in those things, and that various AI models will let them make those things without investing into the skills to execute, or indeed, even the vision to know what they might want to make. To them, a movie is not a thing you make because you want to express something: a movie is a product, brought to market, and people then pay tickets to see, and they see things like Sora as a way to make movies that people will want to see. This is the only way that the way they talk makes any sense: because they don't know why people want to see movies, them wanting to see it is treated as a given. Of course they'll want to see it, it's a movie.
And like, this isn't that weird. This is the mindset of every money-minded media executive that exists, and is why studio meddling in projects is almost universally bad, and the more meddling there is, the more frantic focus-group testing that's done, the more diluted and bad the art comes out in the end. Classic example is the original theatrical release of Blade Runner which was subject to tons of studio interference before it's release, and the studio's version is so legendarily bad that the studio itself, decades later, has all but fucking buried it at sea.
It's this particular kind of brain worms that infests people who want to get into that space, but have no desire to cultivate skill. They want to make things people love and/or get the money for doing so, but they have no idea why people make things, or why people want the things people make. Hence why all of them are tripping over themselves for their imagined AI future.
And if you think I’m being elitist or whatever, I’m just reading the marketing here. All of this stuff is sold with the primary selling point being you can make stuff without learning the skills required to make stuff so it’s naturally going to be most appealing to people who lack skills and see the acquisition of them, or more likely the difficulty involved in that, as something they don’t want to deal with.
> I see the demand for being able to produce content with 0 effort, but where is the demand to consume it coming from?
There isn't one. The only type of people excited about AI content are people who are into AI, and see it as the aforementioned way to produce potentially algorithmically driven viral content with no skills or effort. And, with anything as unpredictable as various content platform's algorithms, and especially when it's initially starting out, there will be successes, simply by the law of averages. However, no one, and I do mean absolutely no one, is seeking out AI content beyond for the notion of maybe seeing what it's like for it's own sake. People comment regularly on TikTok and elsewhere about how they find the AI voices grating, they dislike the AI captions that don't match what's actually said, and we have ample history of content farms turning out repetitive, odd nonsense that people have already become incredibly sick of... which is basically what you're guaranteed to get when you have an AI generate a TikTok for you, because of both the weight of those videos in the training data, and because of how these models work.
For those in the know, there's been substantial trends going back a decade now of low effort, slop content being driven further and further into irrelevance because for every hundred lazy grindset people trying to generate income, you have one person who knows things and has studied them, who has insight to offer, and figures out the remaining parts by trial and error; how to shoot video well, how to light a set, all of that. And those people naturally move to the top of engagement. You might, MIGHT, catch early accounts or new users who haven't found interesting people yet... but the algorithms on most of these sites, paradoxically, are going to identify those interests and then drive users towards more interesting people talking about them, because that's what the vast majority of users want.
It doesn't need to be important, or like... pillars of civilization type knowledge, this applies to any topic you can think of, no matter how insipid you think it might be. If I was interested in collector Barbie dolls, would that algorithm draw me towards a video of a Barbie enthusiast who owns hundreds of them and has studied the topic to death, or to a content mill churning out detritus of some AI generated Barbie-girl woman, talking in TikTok narrator voice, about how her dolls are so cool and neat? And like, sure, maybe you can make the AI video thing so good that it can reproduce the same room, the same presenter, with perfect features and clarity hosting a collection of dolls you somehow manage to keep in the AI's memory, all of that is difficult, but solvable, in theory anyway. How do you give your AI presenter with her AI dolls anything even remotely interesting to say about the dolls she doesn't collect, in the room that doesn't exist?
This makes great sense to me, but just curious if you or others have a theory as for why Google routinely directs me to “content mill” churned “detritus” as opposed to engaging expert content?
> I am probably just a hopeless conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if this just comes down to the NSA getting full access to the code and operations for auditing purposes or if they decide they have their own agenda.
ByteDance already offered the US this and a seat on the board with the ability to veto any hire they deem suspicious. The real problem is that Meta and Google lost their market share to Tiktok and they are not happy about it.
The same way ByteDance has strong relationship with public and private partners in China, it's the same with Perplexity among Indian organizations based on personal experience.
It would actually be brilliant of the CCP to further entwine itself with Musk via acquisition. I think it goes without saying that the man is an opportunist and a globalist in populist clothing.
(Fwiw I like that he owns Twitter now if for nothing more than the schadenfreude)
To an extent, I agree. I think TikTok is far more insidious. If you look at the agreements US based workers had to sign, to uphold goals of the Chinese government, the injection of state sponsored bias into their product seems pretty explicit. With Meta there have been both private censorship decisions (due to the bias of the company’s own executive and employees) as well as pressure from the US government (see Biden administration back channels to request censorship). But even so, I don’t think these are comparable in magnitude and extent.
tit for tat makes the U.S. more like the CCP, and less like the version of the U.S. that stands for freedom and democracy (that I presume you want to live in).
if you want to live in an American version of china where instead of bytedance we have zuckagram, go for it. Chinese social media has vastly out-innovated American platforms and the Zuck/Musk response is to ban the competition rather than write a proper law regulating social media platforms
I understand the argument that TikTok is credibly more exposed to demands from the CCP than American Social media. I'm not entirely convinced it's happening to an alarming degree, some collaboration with governments seem inevitable, but I'm also not unconvinced.
I don't see how that in any way leads into an argument of "If China agrees to open up its market to foreign social media, without censorship, then we can consider TikTok existing." That sounds way more like a national capitalist argument than one for national security.
Congress has "supposedly" seen the evidence, but is confidential. But more than that they seem to be acting in something that can happen more than in something that has happened already
I could imagine a future where this leads to Google losing more of their monopoly. Google has search and video (via Youtube), but Perplexity has their search and potentially video through tiktok.
To me this just shows that Perplexity is definitely being controlled by some other force other than AI developers, and different from what they publicly would admit to. Perhaps the US Gov't is involved? ...because I don't think any other investors would be able to hide their true funding source and motives quite like the Gov't.
There are different types of merge.
There's the 'look at it! It just makes sense!' type. There's the 'we wanted to do this thing but you're already doing it' merge. There's the 'let's be a monopoly!' merge, and its sibling, 'you are getting in the way of my aspirations to be a monopoly' merge. There's the quiet merge to deal with debts, the making-it-formal-but-functionally-we-were-already-merged, the hey-that-collaboration-went-well merge, and many more.
And then there's this merge.
The "incredible free PR for almost no effort or money" pretend-merge.
Suddenly tens of millions of people are hearing about Perplexity who hadn't heard of it so far.
My dad (80 years old) just called yesterday to tell me about this cool new app he found- Perplexity. So I guess the PR is working...
I am still holding out hope for the Drumstick-TikTok Merger. We need more humor these days and i'd really love to see someone like Drumstick take it over lol
[1]:https://www.instagram.com/drumstick/reel/DE07qPUywUg
The 'we need training data' merge?
Oh yes, how did I forget about that?
lol what a great way to describe it
Perplexity sounds desperate. They got early traction and have money but they seem to be lost.
Less desperate, more "there is a point where we needed to stop and we have clearly passed it but let's keep going and see what happens."
I think it is more of, holy shit, OpenAI is entering this space, and maybe Anthropic as well. What can we compete with:
- Name? No
- Technology? No because we rely on other LLMs
Do we have anything? No. We've taken in a lot of money from big-name investors, so let's see if we can turn ourselves into a complementary asset before people realize that LLMs are nowhere near what they are sold as.
Playing with house money for the founders
A few days ago they were talking about making a browser. Smells like it's over for their original business plan. Maybe.
Merge with Arc at that point
Did you miss the Arc memo?
Not OP but what happened?
EDIT: Seems like they abandoned it to... make another browser?
They would be buying one of the largest amounts of user generated data in the world. Sounds good to train on.
The entire point is that Perplexity is several orders of magnitude smaller than ByteDance and just making the offer is a sign of immaturity.
I think Perplexity just wants to stay in the news cycle and get more than it's fair share of discussion.
This is obviously not going to happen, and it's absurd anyone's really engaging with it as a serious proposition. But, because they have a new cycle behind it a lot more people are talking about Perplexity than Claude etc.
Lots of training data for: - Lip syncing - Interpretive dance - Hover text
Electrical/framing/machining/woodworking/physics/tumbling/rockclimbing/instruments/etc/etc/etc.
Honestly it would be a goldmine of training data.
Is there anything of value in TikTok videos?
If you're using the term "value" to refer to monetary value, yes. If you're using it to refer to some other kind of value, it probably isn't relevant to the viability of the proposed merge.
I guess the PP question was like "what real world problems could solve an AI trained on TikTok videos?". Sociology research, maybe.
The training data is an absurd moat for a mega social network, that’s why you save everything forever: the machine learning architecture to exploit it hasn’t even been invented yet and you have longitudinal dissensions all but impossible to get otherwise.
Voice, video, sentiment, ads stuff. With today’s technology you know if a user is about to get cheated on before they do.
The same as an AI trained on YouTube. Extremely valuable.
Electricians showing bench demonstrations of what symptoms faulty neutrals cause, machinists doing step-by-step demonstrations of making tooling, including their fuckups, scrapyards doing deep dives into the in-practice economics of when and why they buy and sell, lawyers giving explanations of the laws involved in popular viral accident videos, baking recipes, comedians showing their material, musicians demonstrating techniques, etc
AI needs user data, user generated content and behavior patterns.
Google has platforms Google also purchased Reddit user content. Meta had platforms and user content.
Well yeah all these AI companies are desperate, it's a highly competitive space with billions of dollars being thrown around to try and win it.
My cousin also submitted a bid to merge with TikTok, not sure why that’s not being reported on?!?
Did your cousin raise $500 million? If not, that might be it. He needs big time investors to get his bid on the media radar.
I tried to buy a Ferrari F550 but the salesman kicked me out when I offered him $300.
$500M is nothing to sneeze at, but that is like 3 orders of magnitude less than TikTok’s value.
I don’t doubt TikTok is wildly valuable. Is it really that high? I know tech valuations at this point basically price in compulsory use of their products, but that’s pretty stiff even by contemporary standards right?
Top hit [1] says $200 billion, which is little more believable, but unlike Meta, TikTok has real competition across its entire surface, Meta can leverage its other monopolies and I’m not sure TikTok will be the first social network ever to avoid being encircled, outlasted, and strangled by Menlo Park.
[1] https://apnews.com/article/tiktok-buyers-divestment-ban-8429...
> I don’t doubt TikTok is wildly valuable. Is it really that high?
I think TikTok is currently in the too valuable to measure state. It can literally be used (and some say it has already been used) to drastically influence politics in other countries.
The revenue generated is literally nothing at this stage in my opinion. China would be more than happy to spend billions at a loss if it means it can keep the same reach.
200 billion is 3 orders of magnitude larger than 500 million.
TikTok reported 16B in revenue in 2023. In the same period SNAP reported 4B in revenue. You could conservatively say TikTok is worth 80B from that metric alone.
>I’m not sure TikTok will be the first social network ever to avoid being encircled, outlasted, and strangled by Menlo Park.
TikTok’s growth has been massive - but you may be right only because Meta decided to get the teacher to change the rules; not because Meta was able to out execute TikTok
It's a shame because Perplexity is BY FAR the most useful AI tool out there. This shows they have clearly no vision and won't be able to keep afloat.
I would have agreed up until a few weeks ago. ChatGPT search is getting better, but kind of superficial so I still preferred Perplexity. But the new Gemini Deep Research is waaay better than Perplexity at deeper Internet searches and I imagine only will continue to get better.
Perplexity is useful as a thin layer of product over a base model. As Sam Altman said, eventually all such startups will be steamrolled by companies that own the models.
Sam Altman is not a credible figure, and that quote was rubbish IMO. There’s no inherent reason that foundation model trainers (the dumb pipes of the AI era) will win RAG by default. Apps like Perplexity aren’t even really constrained by the strength of the model. The secret sauce is the information retrieval, where OpenAI has no special advantage. But Google sure does…
He might say that, but I think in fact the opposite is true. The models are getting commodified. The real value lies in distribution (access to customers) and consumer product skills.
Yeah, but the distributers are always depend on the models. And they'll have to pay their licenses. And the ones who control the model have quite an influence on all of us.
They don’t have to pay for licenses for open models. Although I’m not sure if Meta’s licenses have some sort of restriction on who can use it.
I have been using / fanboi'ing Perplexity since January 2022; overall, I am disappointed in the direction their product has been heading. While it is still the first URL I visit when I want apprentice-level help, I don't think this will be true for much longer.
If anybody at perplexity wants my more-direct feedback (beyond what I've submitted via your platform's conversations), my postal is listed in /hn/bio (I do not use email, so if your platform eventually `requires` this it's an immediate disusership from me dawg).
I'm pretty sure no one at Perplexity cares. That's my honest, genuine, sober impression based on my own experience.
I mean, thanks to llama/deepseek, the models are now essentially free.
Please explain why do you think they're the most useful by far? Just curious of such a bold statement in a highly competitive space.
Not OP but it used to be that if you wanted an LLM that would cite its sources - Perplexity was one of the only games in town that did a really good job combining an LLM with an active search engine.
It was also much better for posing questions that required the most up-to-date knowledge.
Why do you sound like a bot.
Probably because bots are trained to sound like people.
It starts with a search and reasoning from there. Cites the sources in the middle of the sentences so you can just click and verify, see the whole context.
It blows every "model only" service because it's 100x more accurate.
I use it instead of Google for every search now.
Search is the most if not only useful application of LLMs. In this space there is also Phind. It seems I use Perplexity as often as Google nowadays.
Deepseek's search is pretty much on par with perplexity already
Perplexity are also flagrant copyright violators
Because they summarize and cite sources or because their models were trained on copyrighted materials? Summarization and training should be tranformative, and the user questions add that element of novel purpose to the original materials that should make the output non derivative. But most of their responses are one time use, nobody is ever returning to them.
No, because they plagiarize
https://www.wired.com/story/perplexity-plagiarized-our-story...
More than every other AI company?
Ha ha, Perplexity is the green bubble of chatbots.
Always interested in alternatives. What do you suggest?
Or due to their power, they've already secretly been taken over by the US Gov't. That's not really a "big conspiracy theory" at this point. I was mocked by the left for years for saying that the Gov't was involved in Facebook censorship. Turns out I was right. The biggest battle our Gov't has to wage is the battle for hearts and minds, and the control of information, and so they're trying to get in as deeply rooted as possible with every big AI company.
Are you referring to the firehose of covid misinformation spewed out of Facebook, or some other grift?
To be clear I wasn't blaming just the Gov't for all the censorship, because 99% of Facebook employees (including Zuck himself) were strongly in favor of censoring all conservative viewpoints, as well, and were in lock-step with Big Gov't controlling speech.
Zuck recently tried to blame it all on the FEDs (on JRE podcast) but he was obviously lying because Facebook even built a special portal for the FEDs to log into, for moderating/controlling the public, so he was the ring-leader of all the censorship, for about a decade.
my God what social media does to people to write and believe stuff like this… hopefully one day everything will be banned… amazing to read this - just amazing what seemingly normal human being can be made into believing!
Aw, Silicon Valley doesn't want everything banned. They just want all ideas that go against their world view banned. lol.
99% of Facebook employees (including Zuck himself) were strongly in favor of censoring all conservative viewpoints, as well, and were in lock-step with Big Gov't controlling speech.
how can you write this with the straight face when top like 100 accounts spreading shit on Facebook are right-wing nutcases. Give me on popular left-wing nutcase on Facebook?! believing that conservative views on any social media platform were ever being supressed is downright craaaaazy :)
Sorry dude. Nobody believes any of that in 2025. The claim that conservatives weren't being singled out on Social Media is laughable nowadays. All the companies have ADMITTED doing it. The Gov't has ADMITTED doing it.
I mean, conservatives were getting censored/attacked even for true things like saying COVID might have leaked from a lab, that there are only two sexes, that Hunter Laptop was real, that FBI lied on FISA warrant, that people meds are have horse-versions of them, Biden is senile, and on and on and on for countless other things.
kind of cool seeing where you are getting your “information” :) godspeed with all that!
Even CNN/MSM admits all of this nowadays, and you know it, but won't admit it.
And yet Twitter is censoring progressive viewpoints and even skewed the algo toward promoting a certain political candidate and yet not a single word from those free speech warriors.
https://www.theverge.com/2024/11/17/24298669/musk-trump-endo...
I'm generally in favor of Free Speech, but after Silicon Valley censored conservatives for a decade, during the entire Cancel Culture era, I think for them (liberals) to get to experience what it feels like to be censored themselves is probably a good thing. A good learning experience for them to begin to understand first hand how it feels, and what they did to others, without remorse, and with ill intent, for a decade.
So I say to all liberals complaining about Twitter censorship: "Turnabout is fair play" and "You deserve it, because you invented it."
"Yes, yes, that will show them... Fair play." In the background, the country burning.
Every Democrat in the DC Swamp is quaking in their boots right now out of fear that the Republicans might do to them what they did to the Republicans. They expect it to happen, because being so revenge-oriented themselves, they know it's what they'd do.
The difference is that, unlike liberals, Conservatives (especially MAGA) are God-fearing law-and-order abiding people, not motivated by hate, and not the evildoers that they were falsely accused of being, by the insane left and their Senile POTUS, for the past 8 years.
So don't worry, Democrats have nothing to fear but the exposing of their hypocrisy, and more loss of reputation as more truths come out.
That’s the bulk of the “justifiable” censorship but if you dig into the [largely overrated] “Twitter files,” sometimes they even got mad about jokes.
I don't know if it would come with the deal, but Bytedance web crawler is known to be the one with top number of requests per day among AI crawlers (src: https://blog.cloudflare.com/declaring-your-aindependence-blo... ) I guess one of Perplexity challenges is to have their own web index and of course that starts with having a powerful crawler. Also having a powerful crawler is useful for capturing tokens to train models. If that technology comes with the deal, it makes perfect sense for Perplexity to acquire them.
Funnily enough the Cloudflare blog identifies Perplexity engaging in dodgy practices to avoid robots.txt denylists:
> Sadly, we’ve observed bot operators attempt to appear as though they are a real browser by using a spoofed user agent. We’ve monitored this activity over time, and we’re proud to say that our global machine learning model has always recognized this activity as a bot, even when operators lie about their user agent.
Clearly not working too well.
Lol, I had to report Facebook using the documented Facebook crawler UA, coming from Facebook ASN as a bot to them because they misclassified it. Don't expect too much from their global machine. I wonder if this case also included people manually reporting it...
Deeply unserious (like the rest of the TikTok saga) and TikTok even at a depressed price is worth far more than perplexity.
The world is a joke.[!] Nihilism seems so appealing these days. Please, someone walk me through the concept of hope in 2025.
[!] Updated TikTok message: https://bsky.app/profile/gloomchen.bsky.social/post/3lg2xe4t...
Perplexity does everything to get some PR, no matter how stupid and unrealistic. This seems very desperate and raises some at least orange flags.
This has calling out favorite celebrity saying "Fine I'll marry you" when they don't know who you energy ...
they just acquired read.cv: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/17/perplexity-acquires-read-c....
Perplexity is a pretty awesome and much needed app, but Aravind Srinivas has many posts on X reek of a desperate need to succeed - scruples aside. To me that signals an inevitable enshitification.
After the non-exodus from Reddit and Twitter enshittification is a given, in time. It's been proven not to sink a business.
This. We now have proof positive that network effects are stronger than it repulsion at hostile changes.
On that note, Facebook going all in on AI slop is brilliant. Most users will stay at the trough for ever increasing lengths of time.
twitter is fantastic man. it's great. i do miss hearing from (liberal) people who for whatever reason can't stomach people not agreeing with them. i hope they come around. like why does steven king care? i like his books, just talk about the books/his life. i never cared about his politics either way. if you can't separate your life from politics ughhh he's supposed to be smart. sad so many smart liberal people act like all the people i grew up with in church.
What a circus
The great lengths people go to for PR. :)
Well, they at least achieved some free PR for these shenanigans. Probably their best outcome.
I'm not sure why people keep expecting ByteDance to actually sell TikTok. The US isn't even that big of a market for them in global terms. India was a bigger market for them, and it was way bigger than the US. They're just going to shut down in US and focus on BRICS countries instead.
Not all users are the same for Ad Revenue.
That's true, but the sheer volume of users outside the US more than makes up for that.
I don't know about that - seems like US is close to half of Tiktok revenue: "TikTok took in an estimated $10 billion in revenue in the United States last year, he said, out of a total global revenue estimated at $20 billion to $26 billion." [1]
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/17/technology/tiktok-ban-byt...
US market isn't likely to grow much going forward though, while developing countries have a lot of growth potential. Meanwhile, TikTok is bringing in at least 10bln annually already. Pure profit isn't the only thing that makes it valuable though, it's one of the few global media platforms that's not owned by the US.
A new low for Perplexity AI and will do anything for attention.
Obvious PR move, they don't have near enough money.
Kmart bought Sears (back when Sears was far from worthless, and Kmart was fresh off a chapter 11) with nothing but its own overvalued stock, which was based on an inflated valuation of its real estate from a couple of very favorable sales. Point being, don’t rule out financial shenanigans if people who know what they’re doing are involved. (Note: I know nothing about who runs Perplexity)
They’re suggesting a merger, not a sale.
That doesn't really help here. TikTok is at an absolute minimum an order of magnitude more valuable than Perplexity, more likely two orders of magnitude. If ownership of NewCo was even roughly proportional to the market value each side is bringing, the ownership structure doesn't meaningfully change compared to TikTok.
And when the ownership structure is the problem, it's obvious that this deal structured as a merger would solve nothing. They'd need to bring a couple of hundred billion to the table; and then we're back to this being just embarrassing, because obviously the money isn't there.
> TikTok is at an absolute minimum an order of magnitude more valuable than Perplexity, more likely two orders of magnitude
They don't need to buy TikTok, they need to buy out Bytedance.
If I had to structure it, I'd have Bytedance spin out TikTook to its U.S. shareholders and then arrange for Perplexity to buy enough of Bytedance's share that Bytedance holds a 49% (non-voting) interest.
I know. That's why I wrote "value of TikTok". Not market cap of ByteDance.
And to get a controlling share of the merged entity, you'd need to be bring hundreds of billions of value to the merger, not a clownshoes AI startup.
Bytedance without TikTok is still an order of magnitude worth more than Perplexity.
> Bytedance without TikTok is still an order of magnitude worth more than Perplexity
They’re not buying Bytedance - TikTok, they’d be buying half of the piece of TikTok Bytedance would own after spinning it out to its non-Chinese shareholders.
The point still stands, they don't have enough of a relative valuation to even be considered serious and a balance sheet that would be a rounding error to ByteDance.
Disappointing that any real site is promoting this marketing stunt
They not selling till trump do something or nothing
Is this like a Hail Mary pass?
Google has YouTube. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Aravind Srinivas is very ambitious but also smart of course.
TikTok has got to be an absolute gold mine for AI video training because of its short duration format and the amount of videos.
And AI videos seem primed to absolutely explode in popularity and consumption. I don't have access to Veo 2 yet, but Kling 1.6 is pretty amazing, even if it's prompt understanding is a bit random.
I wonder what the TikTok terms of use say about this.
I am probably just a hopeless conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if this just comes down to the NSA getting full access to the code and operations for auditing purposes or if they decide they have their own agenda.
I know that propaganda is a real thing, not a made up conspiracy theory, and companies like TikTok and Perplexity could be key to spreading/controlling it.
In particular, it's difficult to run a war if almost everyone in your country is against it. Which might happen pretty quickly if the wrong video spreads.
Maybe the solution to avoiding WWIII is for the (evil?) military industrial complex bosses in the west and China to get together and realize that they can more effectively surveil and control their populations if they work together. And then they can sell their weapons for purposes of persecuting smaller nations or groups that get out of line. And use the combined power of the monopoly information distribution companies in both countries to propagandize the world.
There you go, I just solved world peace. You're welcome.
I see the demand for being able to produce content with 0 effort, but where is the demand to consume it coming from? I thought people watch tiktoks to interact with people, the desire to engage with nonhuman personalities must be extremely niche, but could be I’m in a millennial/luddite bubble.
That's a good point but there is also a lot more passive consumption than actual interaction.
Also, AI video's IQ is generally pretty low now, but it still has the capacity to create very tailored experiences, such as with AI influencers automatically responding to every single comment from any viewer that donates X dollars. The are limitations to the digital avatars and video generation etc., but they are already very engaging. And in the next 1-3 years they will get much better.
Where we are headed in possibly 2-5 years is the expectation for many people that the personalities, activities, videos in general are completely customized for them or for the communities they are in. And change immediately based on their whims (or constrained by more realistic humanlike reactions if desired).
LTX video can be fine-tuned to produce a consistent character and runs at realtime frame rates. It is a tiny 2b model and it's understanding of prompts and the world is garbage because of that, but hardware and models keep getting much much better.
Before investing billions in individually curated, generated influencers and content creators, maybe we should market test it first and see if it's what anybody actually wants, let alone whether it's even achievable in any meaningful way.
A lot of AI people make strong assumptions about what the consumer market demand is for explicitly (as in, not "tricking" the user) AI generated art, music and content.
The fundamental issue is extremely pro-AI people do not respect any creative endeavor at all, and therefore all of this is unknowable to them. They don't know why people are interested in art or why people want to make art; movies, images, music, any form of creative expression; they simply know that people are interested in those things, and that various AI models will let them make those things without investing into the skills to execute, or indeed, even the vision to know what they might want to make. To them, a movie is not a thing you make because you want to express something: a movie is a product, brought to market, and people then pay tickets to see, and they see things like Sora as a way to make movies that people will want to see. This is the only way that the way they talk makes any sense: because they don't know why people want to see movies, them wanting to see it is treated as a given. Of course they'll want to see it, it's a movie.
And like, this isn't that weird. This is the mindset of every money-minded media executive that exists, and is why studio meddling in projects is almost universally bad, and the more meddling there is, the more frantic focus-group testing that's done, the more diluted and bad the art comes out in the end. Classic example is the original theatrical release of Blade Runner which was subject to tons of studio interference before it's release, and the studio's version is so legendarily bad that the studio itself, decades later, has all but fucking buried it at sea.
It's this particular kind of brain worms that infests people who want to get into that space, but have no desire to cultivate skill. They want to make things people love and/or get the money for doing so, but they have no idea why people make things, or why people want the things people make. Hence why all of them are tripping over themselves for their imagined AI future.
And if you think I’m being elitist or whatever, I’m just reading the marketing here. All of this stuff is sold with the primary selling point being you can make stuff without learning the skills required to make stuff so it’s naturally going to be most appealing to people who lack skills and see the acquisition of them, or more likely the difficulty involved in that, as something they don’t want to deal with.
> I see the demand for being able to produce content with 0 effort, but where is the demand to consume it coming from?
There isn't one. The only type of people excited about AI content are people who are into AI, and see it as the aforementioned way to produce potentially algorithmically driven viral content with no skills or effort. And, with anything as unpredictable as various content platform's algorithms, and especially when it's initially starting out, there will be successes, simply by the law of averages. However, no one, and I do mean absolutely no one, is seeking out AI content beyond for the notion of maybe seeing what it's like for it's own sake. People comment regularly on TikTok and elsewhere about how they find the AI voices grating, they dislike the AI captions that don't match what's actually said, and we have ample history of content farms turning out repetitive, odd nonsense that people have already become incredibly sick of... which is basically what you're guaranteed to get when you have an AI generate a TikTok for you, because of both the weight of those videos in the training data, and because of how these models work.
For those in the know, there's been substantial trends going back a decade now of low effort, slop content being driven further and further into irrelevance because for every hundred lazy grindset people trying to generate income, you have one person who knows things and has studied them, who has insight to offer, and figures out the remaining parts by trial and error; how to shoot video well, how to light a set, all of that. And those people naturally move to the top of engagement. You might, MIGHT, catch early accounts or new users who haven't found interesting people yet... but the algorithms on most of these sites, paradoxically, are going to identify those interests and then drive users towards more interesting people talking about them, because that's what the vast majority of users want.
It doesn't need to be important, or like... pillars of civilization type knowledge, this applies to any topic you can think of, no matter how insipid you think it might be. If I was interested in collector Barbie dolls, would that algorithm draw me towards a video of a Barbie enthusiast who owns hundreds of them and has studied the topic to death, or to a content mill churning out detritus of some AI generated Barbie-girl woman, talking in TikTok narrator voice, about how her dolls are so cool and neat? And like, sure, maybe you can make the AI video thing so good that it can reproduce the same room, the same presenter, with perfect features and clarity hosting a collection of dolls you somehow manage to keep in the AI's memory, all of that is difficult, but solvable, in theory anyway. How do you give your AI presenter with her AI dolls anything even remotely interesting to say about the dolls she doesn't collect, in the room that doesn't exist?
This makes great sense to me, but just curious if you or others have a theory as for why Google routinely directs me to “content mill” churned “detritus” as opposed to engaging expert content?
> I am probably just a hopeless conspiracy theorist, but I wonder if this just comes down to the NSA getting full access to the code and operations for auditing purposes or if they decide they have their own agenda.
ByteDance already offered the US this and a seat on the board with the ability to veto any hire they deem suspicious. The real problem is that Meta and Google lost their market share to Tiktok and they are not happy about it.
Perplexity at this point like that single uncle shooting his shot with anything breathing.
And why is that? P is the only AI company that I am constantly using. It is as important to me as google.
n=1
Perplexity is going to be a nice headstone in the AI graveyard once the bubble pops
I disagree.
The same way ByteDance has strong relationship with public and private partners in China, it's the same with Perplexity among Indian organizations based on personal experience.
Worst case, they pull an Ola
Bytedance is a Chinese company. Perplexity is an American company
Ik.
And Aravind has been fairly vocal about India, and is drastically expanding their lobbying and growth team in India as we speak.
Tbf, a lot of it is probably because of the IITM "mafia" - they have an amazing alumni network and are fairly close.
It would actually be brilliant of the CCP to further entwine itself with Musk via acquisition. I think it goes without saying that the man is an opportunist and a globalist in populist clothing.
(Fwiw I like that he owns Twitter now if for nothing more than the schadenfreude)
[flagged]
> one massive privacy invading democracy undermining psyop
Sounds like Meta.
To an extent, I agree. I think TikTok is far more insidious. If you look at the agreements US based workers had to sign, to uphold goals of the Chinese government, the injection of state sponsored bias into their product seems pretty explicit. With Meta there have been both private censorship decisions (due to the bias of the company’s own executive and employees) as well as pressure from the US government (see Biden administration back channels to request censorship). But even so, I don’t think these are comparable in magnitude and extent.
At this stage, I don't care whether TikTok, Meta or X is controlled by/controls a nation. They're just harmful.
tit for tat makes the U.S. more like the CCP, and less like the version of the U.S. that stands for freedom and democracy (that I presume you want to live in).
if you want to live in an American version of china where instead of bytedance we have zuckagram, go for it. Chinese social media has vastly out-innovated American platforms and the Zuck/Musk response is to ban the competition rather than write a proper law regulating social media platforms
I understand the argument that TikTok is credibly more exposed to demands from the CCP than American Social media. I'm not entirely convinced it's happening to an alarming degree, some collaboration with governments seem inevitable, but I'm also not unconvinced.
I don't see how that in any way leads into an argument of "If China agrees to open up its market to foreign social media, without censorship, then we can consider TikTok existing." That sounds way more like a national capitalist argument than one for national security.
Congress has "supposedly" seen the evidence, but is confidential. But more than that they seem to be acting in something that can happen more than in something that has happened already
There is absolutely no difference between TikTok, Meta, Google et al.
I could imagine a future where this leads to Google losing more of their monopoly. Google has search and video (via Youtube), but Perplexity has their search and potentially video through tiktok.
To me this just shows that Perplexity is definitely being controlled by some other force other than AI developers, and different from what they publicly would admit to. Perhaps the US Gov't is involved? ...because I don't think any other investors would be able to hide their true funding source and motives quite like the Gov't.
i see what you did there
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