Video of the Week: Perplexity Questions

If you're a fan of Squid Game - and internet search, and AI, and slightly predictable endings - then this is most definitely the video for you.

Perplexity is leaning into its (vanishing?) window of opportunity to bump its value up by going all-out in zeitgeisty cultural touchstones. It carved out quite a nice niche for itself by essentially being AI Google Search before Google was able to deploy its AI Search in any meaningful way. Hamstrung by its massive Adwords revenues, Google had hoped that it would be able to carefully build a bridge from its historic business model to a new AI one, without rocking the boat too much.

Perplexity had other ideas. It created a popular (amongst AI first-movers) platform that would go and search the internet for you. It had a moment in the sun when Google and OpenAI couldn't get their search to work properly. Perplexity has a load of legal cases against it for copyright infringement - but then that's been the price of entry into the Generative AI space for every model out there.

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But now its own business is under threat, as Google and OpenAI (and everyone else) has gotten their backsides into gear and their AI search teams into internal supremacy. Google's Gemini 2.5, released last week, is really good - and contains all of the knowledge that Perplexity has, plus a load more. OpenAI's ChatGPT now searches the internet too - and it's also got some great image generation, bit of video, projects, Deep Research, etc.

So Perplexity has brought out the big guns - Squid Game's Lee Jung-jae - to showcase its underdog position and speedy search chops. Whether it's enough to stop it being run over by the frontier models remains to be seen. More likely, I'd suggest, is that it's acquired by the likes of Amazon or Apple who have really stunk at AI so far.

Whilst it's unclear now how it's going to shape up at this point, the death-match style concept of Squid Game isn't very far away from what is happening to these upstart AI businesses right now.

You'll probably be able to learn of Perplexity's final scene on its own platform, still a few seconds before anyone else ...