Perplexity’s CEO Sees AI Agents as the Next Web Battleground

Wait though … Perplexity—like different AI hunt engines—has been criticized for hallucinating and getting things wrong.

We invited this criticism, because it’s nan champion measurement for america to continually improve. In reality, errors relationship for a mini fraction of results, and our answers are acold much meticulous than 10 bluish links polluted by decades of SEO-optimized content. [In consequence to a follow-up request, Perplexity did not supply further specifications connected correction rates, but Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman, said that reliability is improving constantly]. But nan truth is, accuracy and spot will only go much important arsenic AI integrates into much of our lives, truthful this is thing we’re relentlessly focused on. We can’t get location without this feedback.

Perplexity besides cribs from copyrighted news articles pinch its “discover” section. Do you understand why immoderate publishers are upset?

We’ve answered that before. See our blog post connected really we respect robots.txt [a record added to websites that specifies whether web crawlers should entree their content].

The Perplexity adjunct for Android and iOS seems “agentic” because it tin return actions. How large of a displacement is this?

AI is beautiful bully astatine answering questions now. What really needs to beryllium done is get AI to return actions. People usage nan connection “agents”; you tin spell pinch immoderate you want—“agent” aliases “assistant”—but successful nan end, it needs to drawstring together devices and execute actions. That’s why we’re [also building a] browser, and an adjunct connected iOS, Android.

Do Apple and Google person excessively overmuch power complete their mobile platforms compared to outsiders looking to build agents?

With iOS it’s peculiarly challenging, because you person to drawstring together a bunch of arena APIs. On iOS, Mail, Calendar, Reminders, Podcasts, each that worldly is natively disposable done nan Apple SDK [software improvement kit utilized to build applications], truthful you tin really astatine slightest draught emails, schedule meetings, move meetings, group reminders, each this stuff, unfastened podcasts beautiful easily. You tin do searches for podcasts … “get maine nan 1 wherever Mark Andreessen discusses de-banking pinch Joe Rogan.” It tin get you that beautiful quickly.

It’s mostly difficult because you cannot entree different apps. iOS is not very different from Android, because AI cannot entree astir apps connected Android either (meaning that nan Perplexity adjunct tin interact pinch immoderate apps much easy than others). [But] third-party apps tin build their SDKs to beryllium accessible connected nan Android SDK. For example, our Android strategy tin show a opus connected Spotify. On iOS, you tin only nexus to a circumstantial Spotify song, and you person to manually commencement playing nan audio.

Oh, truthful it’s app-makers that are holding AI agents back?

That’s nan challenge. If group are offering america APIs—say, Open Table, Uber, DoorDash, aliases Instacart—where we tin entree accusation wrong nan app without moreover having to unfastened nan app. On nan backmost end, that’s beautiful powerful. For example, if we tin entree accusation connected Uber and find that Uber comfortableness doesn’t costs much than 5 aliases 10 percent of Uber X, past we tin conscionable book Uber comfortableness for you—if that’s a penchant that you group connected Perplexity.