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Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok

Yawrehto

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.

maeil

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.

luckman212

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...

saturn8601

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

cyanydeez

The 'we need training data' merge?

Yawrehto

Oh yes, how did I forget about that?

startup-student

lol what a great way to describe it

vinni2

Perplexity sounds desperate. They got early traction and have money but they seem to be lost.

minimaxir

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."

sdesol

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.

nextworddev

Playing with house money for the founders

dtagames

A few days ago they were talking about making a browser. Smells like it's over for their original business plan. Maybe.

startup-student

Merge with Arc at that point

msephton

Did you miss the Arc memo?

ecshafer

They would be buying one of the largest amounts of user generated data in the world. Sounds good to train on.

minimaxir

The entire point is that Perplexity is several orders of magnitude smaller than ByteDance and just making the offer is a sign of immaturity.

crowcroft

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.

PessimalDecimal

Lots of training data for: - Lip syncing - Interpretive dance - Hover text

cwillu

Electrical/framing/machining/woodworking/physics/tumbling/rockclimbing/instruments/etc/etc/etc.

Honestly it would be a goldmine of training data.

null

[deleted]

what

Is there anything of value in TikTok videos?

JoshuaDavid

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.

cwillu

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

null

[deleted]

vaseem

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.

fullshark

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.

ripped_britches

My cousin also submitted a bid to merge with TikTok, not sure why that’s not being reported on?!?

sdesol

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.

janderson215

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.

benreesman

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...

kissgyorgy

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.

dimitri-vs

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.

paxys

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.

anon373839

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…

dmazin

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.

gitaarik

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.

ProllyInfamous

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).

eth0up

I'm pretty sure no one at Perplexity cares. That's my honest, genuine, sober impression based on my own experience.

crimsoneer

I mean, thanks to llama/deepseek, the models are now essentially free.

keyle

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.

vunderba

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.

hshshshshsh

Why do you sound like a bot.

kissgyorgy

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.

Xmd5a

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.

Havoc

Deepseek's search is pretty much on par with perplexity already

mcmcmc

Perplexity are also flagrant copyright violators

visarga

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.

gruez

More than every other AI company?

doctorpangloss

Ha ha, Perplexity is the green bubble of chatbots.

dmazin

Always interested in alternatives. What do you suggest?

quantadev

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.

mjmsmith

Are you referring to the firehose of covid misinformation spewed out of Facebook, or some other grift?

quantadev

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.

amyames

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.

fgblanch

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.

matt_daemon

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.

viraptor

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...

chvid

Deeply unserious (like the rest of the TikTok saga) and TikTok even at a depressed price is worth far more than perplexity.

consumer451

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...

ulfw

Perplexity does everything to get some PR, no matter how stupid and unrealistic. This seems very desperate and raises some at least orange flags.

afinlayson

This has calling out favorite celebrity saying "Fine I'll marry you" when they don't know who you energy ...

dkobia

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.

add-sub-mul-div

After the non-exodus from Reddit and Twitter enshittification is a given, in time. It's been proven not to sink a business.

alangibson

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.

ineedaj0b

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.

paxys

What a circus