🧠 AI Startup Perplexity's Valuation Surges

Perplexity AI's valuation skyrockets as the startup secures more funding talks.

Author

Jack Lajoie
October 21, 2024 • read time ~ 9 minutes

The Daily Current ⚡️

Welcome to the creatives, builders, pioneers, and thought leaders ever driving further into the liminal space.

Perplexity has been a stand out this year for its ability to draw both investor enthusiasm and legal scrutiny. Their valuation expansion is notable, even as they face mounting challenges from publishers. Microsoft is launching customizable AI agents right within CoPilot, Meta's FAIR team announced a host of advancements, and Protegee (from Y Combinator) introduced a payments API for AI agents.

 🔌 Plug Into These Headlines:

Perplexity AI, a startup challenging traditional search engines with its AI-powered approach, is in talks to raise funds at a valuation of around $8 billion. This potential valuation represents a significant increase from its previous $1 billion valuation in March. The company's rapid growth and innovative search technology have attracted interest from major investors, including Jeff Bezos and NVIDIA. Perplexity's success highlights the growing demand for AI-driven search solutions and the competitive landscape in the AI industry.

  • Perplexity's user base has grown to over 10 million monthly active users since its launch in December 2022.

  • The company has raised $100 million to date, with investors including NEA, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

  • The startup's valuation growth from $1 billion to $8 billion in less than a year reflects intense investor appetite for AI technologies.

❓Perplexity’s focus on providing direct answers raises questions about the future of web traffic distribution and its impact on content creators and publishers.

Meta's Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team’s latest advancements showcase significant progress in computer vision, language models, and efficient AI training.

  • SAM 2.1 enhances the popular Segment Anything Model with improved performance on small objects and occlusion handling, accompanied by a Developer Suite for easier implementation

  • Meta Spirit LM introduces a multimodal language model that seamlessly integrates speech and text, enabling more natural-sounding speech generation and cross-modality tasks

  • Layer Skip accelerates large language model generation times by up to 1.7x without specialized hardware, offering an efficient solution for resource-intensive AI applications

  • SALSA advances cryptography research by providing tools to benchmark AI-based attacks on post-quantum cryptography standards, particularly targeting sparse secrets in lattice-based cryptography

  • Meta Lingua presents a lightweight, efficient codebase for training language models at scale, designed to accelerate research by simplifying experiment setup and execution

🔍 Looking ahead — we should expect Meta to explore the potential synergies between these diverse AI advancements, such as combining SAM 2.1's visual capabilities with Spirit LM's multimodal approach, for more comprehensive AI systems.

Microsoft is introducing new autonomous agent capabilities to to CoPilot where users can essentially assemble their own agents. The ability will be in public preview next month, and ten new autonomous agents are being introduced in Dynamics 365. These agents, ranging from simple prompt-and-response to fully autonomous, are intended to execute and orchestrate business processes across various functions.

  • 60% of Fortune 500 companies are already using Microsoft 365 Copilot, with Lumen Technologies projecting $50 million in annual savings.

  • Pets at Home created an agent for its profit protection team, potentially driving seven-figure annual savings.

  • McKinsey & Company's pilot showed a 90% reduction in lead time and 30% reduction in administrative work for client onboarding.

  • Thomson Reuters built an agent to speed up legal due diligence, with initial tests showing some tasks could be completed in half the time.

  • Microsoft's internal use of Copilot resulted in 9.4% higher revenue per seller and 20% more closed deals for one sales team.

  • The Marketing team saw a 21.5% increase in conversion rate on Azure.com with a custom agent.

  • In Human Resources, an employee self-service agent improved question-answering accuracy by 42%.

👀 We’ve been anticipating it for while, and it looks like Microsoft is finally giving us the autonomous agents that we were hoping for. Expect a surge in demand for AI specialists capable of designing, implementing, and managing these autonomous agents across various industries.

New from Y Combinator, Protegee introduces a payments API tailored for AI agents, addressing the growing need for seamless financial transactions in AI-driven applications. This innovative solution enables AI agents to handle payments autonomously. By providing a secure and compliant infrastructure, Protegee aims to accelerate the development of AI-powered financial interactions.

  • Protegee offers an easy-to-use API that enables voice AI agents to accept payments securely.

  • The platform ensures regulatory compliance and security, crucial for handling sensitive financial data.

  • Integration is designed to be simple, with just a few lines of code required to implement the payment functionality.

  • Protegee supports various payment methods, including credit cards and bank transfers, enhancing flexibility for users.

  • The API's design considers scalability, allowing it to handle high-volume transactions as AI agent usage grows.

Just when we thought we were officially past the era of calling the airline to change your flight, suddenly we’ll be allowed to call AI agents that are happy to take our credit card info down…what could go wrong? But for real, there have to be plenty of interesting applications for this in the financial sector. Maybe we’re seeing a world where to make transactions we send personal agents to meet with business agents in the matrix — “I’ll have my people call your people!” 😎

News Corp's lawsuit against Perplexity AI marks a significant escalation in the ongoing battle between traditional media and AI companies. The suit alleges copyright infringement and unfair competition, claiming Perplexity's AI-powered search engine reproduces copyrighted content without permission. This legal action highlights the growing tension between content creators and AI firms, potentially setting a precedent for future disputes in the rapidly evolving AI landscape.

  • The lawsuit targets Perplexity's use of News Corp content in its AI-powered search results, including verbatim reproductions and paraphrases.

  • News Corp argues that Perplexity's actions constitute "free-riding" on their journalistic investments and threaten their business model.

  • The complaint also alleges that Perplexity's AI model was trained on copyrighted material without authorization.

  • News Corp seeks injunctive relief and monetary damages, including profits derived from the alleged infringement.

🤔 Fresh on the heels of Perplexity’s valuation exploding from $1 to $8 billion, is this lawsuit a real threat or just an annoyance?