Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity AI has raised tens of millions of dollars from prominent tech investors, including Jeff Bezos, with a mission to take on Google in the information search business.
But the company's AI-powered search chatbots are already facing challenges as some news media companies push back against its business practices. Technology giant Google, And now Applean increasing number of companies are incorporating similar AI capabilities into their core products.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has spent much of the past week defending his company after it published a summary news article that contained similar information and language as a Forbes investigation without citing the publication or seeking permission. Forbes said: Similar “copycat” articles plagiarized from other publications were subsequently found.
The Associated Press found that another Perplexity product feature was fabricating fake quotes from real people, including one about a Massachusetts island. Marijuana destinations.
“I never said that,” said Bill Rossi, a former elections board member for the island city of Chilmark.
Srinivas told The Associated Press that his company strives to build good relationships with news publishers so that their news content “reaches a wider audience.”
“We can definitely coexist and help each other,” he said.
Asked about Forbes, he said his company's products “have never plagiarized anyone's content. Our engines aren't trained on other people's content,” in part because the company simply aggregates what other people's AI systems generate.
“We are actually an aggregator of information, providing it to people with proper attribution,” Srinivas said, but added: “Forbes correctly pointed out that they would like us to highlight sources more prominently. We took that feedback right away, fixed it that same day, and now sources are highlighted more prominently.”
Perplexity also said this week that it is exploring revenue-sharing partnerships that would pay news publishers a portion of Perplexity's advertising revenue each time their news content is referenced as a source.
Randall Lane, chief content officer at Forbes Media, called the controversy a “tipping point” in the discussion about AI.
“This is a case study of where we're headed,” Lane told The Associated Press. “If the people leading this effort don't have a fundamental respect for the hard work of doing original journalism and keeping people informed with value-added content, then we're in big trouble.”
Lane, who calls himself an “AI advocate” because he believes AI technology can help many news organizations become more efficient, said the dispute between Perplexity and Forbes is important because it's “a metaphor for what happens when the people who control AI don't respect the people who actually do the work.”
Lane said that while Perplexity describes itself as a search engine, it “acts like a media company, publishing stories that are exclusively reported by Forbes.”
“It was very dishonest across the board, and what we heard wasn't, 'Oh, oh, this failed, we've got to do better,'” he said. “Instead, they were putting out more content, tweaking their model a little bit, treating journalism like it was just a manufactured commodity.”
Srinivas, a computer scientist and former AI researcher at OpenAI and Google, co-founded Perplexity in the summer of 2022, shortly before AI image generation tools Stable Diffusion and OpenAI's ChatGPT began to spark public interest in the potential of generative AI.
Inspired in part by his childhood love of Wikipedia, he described Perplexity to The Associated Press as “kind of like a mix between Wikipedia and ChatGPT,” saying it can instantly answer people's questions without the “messy, confusing” results that Google's traditional search results have.
“You ask a question, you get an answer from a clear source, and you end up with three or four suggested[follow-up]questions,” he said of Perplexity. “That way people's minds are freed from distractions and can be focused on learning and deeper exploration.”
The company sells subscriptions for premium features and plans to launch ad-based services as its user base grows.
“We're not currently profitable as a company, but we're operating more sustainably than basic model companies because we're not training our own basic models, which requires massive computing power,” he said.
Perplexity relies on existing AI large-scale language models built by OpenAI, Anthropic and Facebook's parent company Meta Platforms, and “post-trains” them.
“We're really training them to be good summarisers,” he said.
It's not always clear where the summarized information comes from. Perplexity's feature, called “Writings,” lets users “generate text or chat without searching the Web,” but it often produces lengthy, unsourced commentaries in the style of news articles. An Associated Press reporter tested the feature, asking it to write about: Marijuana shortage The investigation into Martha's Vineyard led the town to produce a 465-word document resembling a news article, complete with fabricated quotes from former town officials and other real people.
The Associated Press did not repeat the misquote to avoid spreading misinformation. Srinivas said Perplexity's writing feature is a “minor use case” intended for writing essays or correcting grammar when primary sources aren't needed. He said it's “prone to hallucinations.” General Problems with AI Large language models — Because we’re not tied to the web search functionality of Perplexity’s core product.
“There's no question that generative AI is transforming journalism, content creation and search,” said Sarah Kreps, director of Cornell University's Technology Policy Institute.
She pointed to approaches like Google's new Perplexity approach, which summarizes answers based on information it gleans from crawling the web, which also helps to reduce misinformation and forced search results. Google makes adjustments After the product is released to the public.
“But their entire advertising model is based on driving people to a website,” she said in an email. “Why would people go to a website when the output of their AI can give them a one-stop answer?”
“A lot of people have been referred to us by Perplexity, and it's good to see that we're getting referrals from new players on the internet,” Srinivas told the Associated Press.
For now, many of the benefits may be aspirational: Perplexity's global user base has grown rapidly this year, exceeding 85 million web visits in May, but it pales in comparison with the billions of users of Chat GPT and other popular platforms from Microsoft and Google. Similarweb data.
Steven Lind, an associate professor at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, said the controversy speaks to “uncertain and challenging times” for online content creators in general, and journalism in particular, because aggregators can't function without publications like Forbes.
Using AI as an integrated tool will help disseminate information widely, The manuscript is lost,” He said.
“Entire enterprises and applications are doing this same thing. They're rolling out applications for industries that maybe aren't their expertise, so they roll out new services without fully considering the impacts, best practices and safeguards,” he said.
Lind said it's good to see companies like Perplexity “at least taking some steps to course correct when there's backlash from the industry and from users,” but he added that some changes should have been built in from the start.
