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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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.
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
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.
Lots of training data for: - Lip syncing - Interpretive dance - Hover text
Is there anything of value in TikTok videos?
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.
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.
I mean, thanks to llama/deepseek, the models are now essentially free.
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).
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.
Deepseek's search is pretty much on par with perplexity already
Perplexity are also flagrant copyright violators
Ha ha, Perplexity is the green bubble of chatbots.
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.
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.
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....
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)
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.
What a circus
Well, they at least achieved some free PR for these shenanigans. Probably their best outcome.
The great lengths people go to for PR. :)
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.
A new low for Perplexity AI and will do anything for attention.
They not selling till trump do something or nothing
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.
Disappointing that any real site is promoting this marketing stunt
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.
> 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.
Is this like a Hail Mary pass?
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.
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
[flagged]
> one massive privacy invading democracy undermining psyop
Sounds like Meta.
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.
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