People said the same thing you're saying about Google in the late 90s, early 2000s before their IPO (and immediately afterwards). There was a sense in which people didn't really think search -- which seemed more like a public utility -- could ever be profitable. Yahoo and AltaVista and Excite blanketed theirs in ads and junk. The search itself was seen merely as a draw into a "portal."
It's not inevitable that the same thing happen with services like Perplexity. But I do think things are going to get shaken up.
It seems like Google agrees at some level, because they seem to have just given up.
The big difference with Google monetizing in the 90’s is that they owned their platform, which gave them control to build out a search and ad network that scaled.
Perplexity uses frontier models under the hood, it doesn’t own all core aspects of its platform. They’re extremely dependent on frontier models and therefore reliant on underlying model pricing remaining sustainable.
Yeah I don't think Perplexity in particular is all that interesting.
But these days I do do a lot of 'research phase' stuff right in Claude Code. If looking at a technical issue, etc. I'll give it URLs and terms to search for and let it do some research for me. Mixed results.
People said the same thing you're saying about Google in the late 90s, early 2000s before their IPO (and immediately afterwards). There was a sense in which people didn't really think search -- which seemed more like a public utility -- could ever be profitable. Yahoo and AltaVista and Excite blanketed theirs in ads and junk. The search itself was seen merely as a draw into a "portal."
It's not inevitable that the same thing happen with services like Perplexity. But I do think things are going to get shaken up.
It seems like Google agrees at some level, because they seem to have just given up.