Johnny Ho, co-founder of Perplexity, shares insights into the company's product development strategy.
Wednesday, May 1, 2024The AI-powered search engine Perplexity, which has tens of millions of users with less than 50 employees, uses AI internally to inform all aspects of building the company. It has small teams of 2-3 people that work in parallel to reduce any coordination costs. The company hires self-driven and very proactive engineers.
The Perplexity search engine has announced a new product for creating long-lasting research artifacts that are shareable and created with AI.
Perplexity will start paying publishers a revenue share from ad sales when their content is used to form AI search answers, marking a new business model for the AI search engine, which will allow brands to buy "related follow-up questions" appearing below user query answers. Publishers will earn a percentage of ad revenue and gain free access to Perplexity's large language models and Pro service tier.
Reddit's CEO is calling on Microsoft and other companies to pay if they want to continue scraping the site's data. The site is now blocking companies that haven't signed agreements about how its data will be used or not used. Companies like Microsoft, Anthropic, and Perplexity have refused to negotiate. OpenAI's SearchGPT will be able to show Reddit results as the two companies reached a deal earlier this year.
Perplexity is expected to launch ads in Q4 across 15 categories, including finance, technology, and health. Advertisers will be able to run “sponsored questions” that appear on related questions and video ads on mobile and desktop.