Perplexity AI submits bid to merge with TikTok
83 comments
·January 18, 2025fgblanch
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.
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
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.
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PessimalDecimal
Lots of training data for: - Lip syncing - Interpretive dance - Hover text
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.
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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.
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…
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.
Havoc
Deepseek's search is pretty much on par with perplexity already
mcmcmc
Perplexity are also flagrant copyright violators
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?
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.
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.
chvid
Deeply unserious (like the rest of the TikTok saga) and TikTok even at a depressed price is worth far more than perplexity.
23B1
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)
m3kw9
They not selling till trump do something or nothing
niedzielski
they just acquired read.cv: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/17/perplexity-acquires-read-c....
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.
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.
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.
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.
paxys
What a circus
woadwarrior01
The great lengths people go to for PR. :)
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.