Perplexity AI Chief Executive Officer Aravind Srinivas issued a broadside against Google’s artificial intelligence products and strategy, marking some of the AI search startup’s strongest criticisms of its rival.Speaking at the Bloomberg Tech summit in San Francisco Thursday, Srinivas panned Google’s AI assistant as a “terrible product” and also claimed the tech giant essentially introduces the same artificial intelligence feature year after year, without actually shipping it to users.Founded in 2022, Perplexity has emerged as one of the most prominent startups using generative AI to rethink core internet services. The company is in advanced discussions to raise a new round of funding at a $14 billion valuation, Bloomberg News has reported.Perplexity is also in talks for a wide-ranging deal to integrate its technology into Samsung’s devices — a tie-up that may reduce the South Korean company’s reliance on Google’s AI software.Srinivas said Google has made it harder for Perplexity to broker partnerships with smartphone makers. “Google has given us a very hard time,” he said, without spelling out exactly what the tech giant has done. “They definitely don’t want us to succeed.”While Perplexity remains a fraction of Google’s size, Srinivas claims the startup might one day be worth trillions by changing how people experience the internet and becoming what he calls “the accuracy layer of AI.”“Every day, trillions of dollars of decisions are made across retail, finance, markets, exchanges, everything,” he said. “If we can influence a big chunk of that, then that will automatically mean we can be worth trillions in market cap one day.”Google’s parent company, Alphabet, currently has a market valuation of more than $2 trillion.
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