Today is Donkey Kong Bananza launch day, and what better way to celebrate than with a discount? The Nintendo Switch 2-exclusive game is currently $62.99 ($7 off) at Costco for members. Nintendo games rarely go on sale, even after several months on shelves, so any amount off the retail price is a big win on launch day.
If you were on the fence about whether to get the game, let our review assuage any concerns. It rules. The Verge’s Ash Parrish describes it as a “fantastic feast.” The game offers satisfying punching mechanics, creative level design, and the unmistakable polish that most Nintendo games possess. Whereas Mario Kart World was a pretty good launch title, Donkey Kong Bananza is the Switch 2’s first must-have game.
The Anker Charging Station (7-in-1, 100W) is a great desk accessory for charging multiple devices, and it’s currently down to $35.99 ($14 off) at Amazon, which is an all-time low price. The charging station offers a maximum output of 100W, allowing you to charge power-hungry devices quickly. There are seven ports in total — three AC outlets on the back, and four USB ports (two USB-C and two USB-A) on the front. In addition, the charging station offers surge protection and a 5-foot built-in cable, giving you flexibility to position it where you want.
The CMF Buds Pro with active noise cancellation are down to just $29 ($20 off) at Amazon, the lowest price we’ve seen. The wireless earbuds feature a stem design similar to AirPods, and offer premium features like transparency mode, an adjustable EQ, and up to 6.5 hours of battery life. With microphones inside and outside the earbuds, the ANC feature can suppress noise of up to 45dB, giving you peace and quiet at the coffee shop.
Epic Games is hosting a summer sale through July 31st, offering modest discounts on games like Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for $47.99 ($12 off), Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 for $44.99 ($5 off), and Assassin’s Creed Shadows for $52.49 ($17 off). One of the most notable perks of the sale is that each purchase lands you an extra 20 percent back in Epic Rewards using Epic’s payment system through August 31st. You can redeem Epic Rewards on future game purchases or add-ons, though Epic says you can’t use the rewards on subscriptions like Fortnite Crew.
For nearly two years, students at Columbia University have warned that they're being targeted - and put in serious danger - by right-wing Zionist organizations like Canary Mission and Betar US. Canary Mission's goal was initially to "expose" students it deemed antisemitic, ideally in the hopes that they'd be denied jobs and other opportunities. In the aftermath of October 7th, students who were targeted by Canary Mission and similar groups said they experienced a surge of online harassment that increasingly spilled over into real life. The stakes were raised further upon Donald Trump's reelection. Under Trump's brutal immigration enforcement …
I've been using the Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 7 for the past week, and I think I can finally say it: I get folding phones. The Z Fold 7 so slim and so nice to use, that I'm looking at the whole category in a whole new light. It's great timing, because it looks like phones with two sets of hinges might be on the way. Huawei did it first, of course, but Samsung seems serious about launching its trifold in the near future, and Chinese brand Tecno just teased an enticing-looking concept. And you know what? Bring them on.
Don't get me wrong, I love a small phone. I plan to keep my iPhone 13 Mini until it becomes a security hazard. But big phones hav …
The massive budget bill signed into law by President Donald Trump on Independence Day didn't include everything on Big Tech's wishlist, but the industry's largest players stand to gain significantly from several provisions in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act.
The News/Media Alliance, a trade association behind major news publishers, announced that it has “successfully secured” the removal of 12ft.io, a website that helped users bypass paywalls online. The trade association says 12ft.io’s webhost took down the site on July 14th “following the News/Media Alliance’s efforts.”
12ft.io — or 12 Foot Ladder — also allowed users to view webpages without ads, trackers, or pop-ups by disguising a user’s browser as a web crawler, giving them unfettered access to a webpage’s contents. Software engineer Thomas Millar says he created the site when he realized “8 of the top 10 links on Google were paywalled” when doing research during the pandemic.
Over the past decade, the online publishing business model has become increasingly unstable. For many years, websites gave readers free access because they were supported by advertising revenue, which is dependent on pageviews. But as traffic has fluctuated, in large part due to changes to Google’s Search algorithm and an increasing shift toward AI search, many magazines, including The Verge, have diversified their business to become more dependent on subscriptions and paywalls to support themselves. The attempts for publishers to become more sustainable have also led to an internet that is less open and accessible — a complaint that Millar’s project is responding to.
Still, in an ironic twist, Millar began asking users to pay for a subscription to 12ft.io to help cover the cost of the tool in 2022. “I’m making it my mission to clean the web,” Millar said at the time.
In its announcement, News/Media Alliance says 12ft.io “offered illegal circumvention technology” that allowed users to access copyrighted content without paying for it. The organization adds that it will take “similar actions” against other sites that let users get around paywalls. The News Media Alliance recently called Google’s AI Mode “theft.” (Like many chatbots, Google’s AI Mode eliminates the need to visit a website, starving publishers of the pageviews they need to be compensated for their work.)
“Publishers commit significant resources to creating the best and most informative content for consumers, and illegal tools like 12ft.io undermine their ability to financially support that work through subscriptions and ad revenue,” News/Media Alliance president and CEO Danielle Coffey said in the press release. “Taking down paywall bypassers is an essential part of ensuring we have a healthy and sustainable information ecosystem.”
Disclosure: The Verge’s parent company, Vox Media, is a member of the News/Media Alliance.
OpenAI is going all-in on the most-hyped trend in AI right now: AI agents, or tools that go a step beyond chatbots to complete complex, multi-step tasks on a user’s behalf. The company on Thursday debuted ChatGPT Agent, which it bills as a tool that can complete work on your behalf using its own “virtual computer.”
In a briefing and demo with The Verge, Yash Kumar and Isa Fulford — product lead and research lead on ChatGPT Agent, respectively — said it’s powered by a new model that OpenAI developed specifically for the product. The company said the new tool can perform tasks like looking at a user’s calendar to brief them on upcoming client meetings, planning and purchasing ingredients to make a family breakfast, and creating a slide deck based on its analysis of competing companies.
The model behind ChatGPT Agent, which has no specific name, was trained on complex tasks that require multiple tools — like a text browser, visual browser, and terminal where users can import their own data — via reinforcement learning, the same technique used for all of OpenAI’s reasoning models. OpenAI said that ChatGPT Agent combines the capabilities of both Operator and Deep Research, two of its existing AI tools.
To develop the new tool, the company combined the teams behind both Operator and Deep Research into one unified team. Kumar and Fulford told The Verge that the new team is made up of between 20 and 35 people across product and research.
In the demo, Kumar and Fulford demonstrated potential use cases for ChatGPT Agent, like asking it to plan a date night by connecting to Google Calendar to see when the user has a free evening, and then cross-referencing OpenTable to find openings at certain types of restaurants. They also showed how a user could interrupt the process by adding, say, another restaurant category to search for. Another demonstration showed how ChatGPT Agent could generate a research report on the rise of Labubus versus Beanie Babies.
Fulford said she enjoyed using it for online shopping because the combination of tech behind Deep Research and Operator worked better and was more thorough than trying the process solely using Operator. And Kumar said he had begun using ChatGPT Agent to automate small parts of his life, like requesting new office parking at OpenAI every Thursday instead of showing up Monday having forgotten to request it with nowhere to park.
Kumar said that since ChatGPT Agent has access to “an entire computer” instead of just a browser, they’ve “enhanced the toolset quite a bit.”
According to the demo, though, the tool can be a bit slow. When asked about latency, Kumar said their team is more focused on “optimizing for hard tasks” and that users aren’t meant to sit and watch ChatGPT Agent work.
“Even if it takes 15 minutes, half an hour, it’s quite a big speed-up compared to how long it would take you to do it,” Fulford said, adding that OpenAI’s search team is more focused on low-latency use cases. “It’s one of those things where you can kick something off in the background and then come back to it.”
Before ChatGPT Agent does anything “irreversible,” like sending an email or making a booking, it asks for permission first, Fulford said.
Since the model behind the tool has increased capabilities, OpenAI said it has activated the safeguards it created for “high biological and chemical capabilities,” even though the company said it does not have “direct evidence that the model could meaningfully help a novice create severe biological or chemical harm” in the form of weapons. Anthropic in May activated similar safeguards for its launch of one of its Claude models, Opus 4.
When asked about whether the tool is permitted to perform financial transactions, Kumar said those actions have been restricted “for now,” and that there’s an additional protection called Watch Mode, wherein if a user navigates to a certain category of webpages, like financial sites, they must not navigate away from the tab ChatGPT Agent is operating in or the tool will stop working.
OpenAI will start rolling out the tool today to Pro, Plus, and Team users — pick “agent mode” in the tools menu or type “/agent” to access it — and the company said it will make it available to ChatGPT Enterprise and Education users later this summer. There’s no rollout timeline yet for the European Economic Area and Switzerland.
The concept of AI agents has been a buzzworthy trend in the industry for years. The ideal developers are working toward is something like Iron Man’s J.A.R.V.I.S., a tool that can perform specific job functions, check people’s calendars for the best time to schedule an event, purchase a gift based on a friend’s preferences, and more, but at the moment, they’re somewhat limited to assisting with coding and compiling research reports.
The term “AI agent” became more common to investors and tech executives in 2023 and quickly picked up speed, especially after fintech company Klarna announced in February 2024 that in just one month of operation, its own AI agent had handled two-thirds of its customer service chats — the equivalent of 700 full-time human workers. From there, executives at Amazon, Meta, Google, and more started mentioning their AI agent goals on earnings call after earnings call. And since then, AI companies have been strategically hiring to reach those goals: Google, for instance, last week hired Windsurf’s CEO, co-founder and some R&D team members to help further its agentic AI projects.
OpenAI’s debut of ChatGPT Agent follows its January release of Operator, which the company billed as “an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you” since it was trained to be able to handle the internet’s buttons, text fields and more. It’s also part of a larger trend in AI, as companies large and small chase AI agents that will capture the attention of consumers and ideally become habits. Last October, Anthropic, the Amazon-backed AI startup behind Claude, released a similar tool called “Computer Use,” which it billed as a tool that could use a computer the same way a human can in order to complete tasks on a user’s behalf. Multiple AI companies, including OpenAI, Google and Perplexity, also offer an AI tool that all three have dubbed Deep Research, denoting an AI agent that can write sizable analyses and research reports on anything a user wants.
A California federal judge ruled Thursday that three authors suing Anthropic over copyright infringement can bring a class action lawsuit representing all U.S. writers whose work was allegedly downloaded from libraries of pirated works.
The filing alleges that Anthropic, the Amazon-backed OpenAI competitor behind the chatbot Claude, “violated the Copyright Act by doing Napster-style downloading of millions of works.” It alleges that the company downloaded as many as seven million copies of books from libraries of pirated works.
The new ruling impacts a lawsuit filed last August by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who alleged that Anthropic had “built a multibillion-dollar business by stealing hundreds of thousands of copyrighted books.” Late last month, a federal judge sided with Anthropic to rule that training its AI models on legally-purchased books was fair use but noted the company would need to face a separate trial for using allegedly pirated books.
It also follows the lawsuit Reddit filed against Anthropic last month, claiming that the AI company’s bots had accessed Reddit more than 100,000 times since last July, after Anthropic had said it blocked them from doing so.
The authors’ lawsuit is part of a growing trend of media outlets, platforms, companies, and creatives either suing AI companies over copyright infringement — for instance, Universal Music’s 2023 lawsuit against Anthropic over “systematic and widespread infringement of their copyrighted song lyrics” — or partnering up with them to willingly provide AI training data in order to get a slice of the profits.
Today is World Emoji Day, and the Unicode Consortium is sharing a preview of some of the new emoji that should hit your devices early next year as part of Unicode 17.0. If you ask me, it’s a promising batch, especially the Bigfoot emoji — sorry, “hairy creature.”
The list includes these emoji, according to the Consortium:
Apple core
Ballet dancers
Distorted Face
Fight cloud
Hairy creature
Orca
Treasure chest
Trombone
I can think of some great uses of all of them – I feel like this is going to be a popular set. They’ll “likely” show up on devices in the spring of 2026, Unicode’s Erik Thompson says in an email. Yes, that’s a long ways away, but the process of making an emoji is actually pretty involved, as I’ve written about.
As part of World Emoji Day, Apple has also launched a new emoji word game that’s available with an Apple News Plus subscription. And Emojipedia has relaunched the EmojiTracker.com website to track real-time emoji use.
It has been five years since Netflix first announced that it was working with Ubisoft to develop a live-action Assassin’s Creed show inspired by the hit games series. For a long time, it seemed like the project might be dead in the water given how little news there was about it. But now it looks like the streamer is ready to lock in and get down to business.
Netflix announced today that it has officially greenlit a new Assassin’s Creed series that will be showrun and executive produced by Roberto Patino (Westworld, Sons of Anarchy) and David Wiener (Halo, Brave New World.) Along with Wiener and Patino, Ubisoft’s Gerard Guillemot, Margaret Boykin, and Austin Dill, and Matt O’Toole are attached to executive produce.
Per Netflix, the new series will focus on “the secret war between two shadowy factions — one set on determining mankind’s future through control and manipulation, while the other fights to preserve free will.” The show will tell stories about multiple characters living through and influencing pivotal moments in human history. That doesn’t exactly say much about what the series will look and feel like, but it does sound like pretty standard Assassin’s Creed fare.
In a statement about the show, Wiener and Patino said that they’re both excited about and humbled by all the possibilities the Assassin’s Creed IP holds. They also expressed their desire to use the series to tell a story about what humanity loses as a species as our emotional connections break.
“Beneath the scope, the spectacle, the parkour and the thrills is a baseline for the most essential kind of human story — about people searching for purpose, struggling with questions of identity and destiny and faith,” the duo said. “It is about power and violence and sex and greed and vengeance. But more than anything, this is a show about the value of human connection, across cultures, across time.”
Netflix has had a fair amount of success with its animated video game adaptations like the Castlevania series, Arcane, and Cyberpunk: Edgerunners. But the streamer has had a much more inconsistent track record on the live-action side of things between its soon-to-be finished Witcher series and its short-lived Resident Evil riff. A five year gap between a project being announced and its subsequent greenlight isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and Wiener and Patino could absolutely be cooking up something fantastic. But we’re going to need to see and hear a bit more about what this Assassin’s Creed is going to be before people can get excited.
AMD’s latest Zen 5-based Ryzen Threadripper Pro 9000 WX-Series of CPUs go on sale later this month, and the top option will be priced at $11,699. The 9000 WX-Series chips are designed for workstations, with the $11,699 Threadripper Pro 9995WX shipping on July 23rd with 96 cores and 192 threads.
Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Supermicro will all start selling high-end workstations with the latest Threadripper 9000 series of chips on July 23rd, and DIY builders will be able to purchase the processors through AMD’s channel partners.
AMD will also offer the 64-core Threadripper Pro 9985WX for $7,999, the 32-core Threadripper Pro 9975WX for $4,099, the 24-core Threadripper Pro 9965WX for $2,899, and the Threadripper Pro 9955WX for $1,649. All five processors are designed to be faster in professional rendering tools like Chaos V-Ray, or tools like Adobe After Effects.
The Pro 9000 WX-Series processors are also designed for local AI deployments, including fine-tuning models, inference, and AI application development. “When running a context-based prompting inference test using DeepSeek R1 32B, we are seeing a 49 percent better performance of Threadripper Pro 9000 over Intel,” claims AMD.
Wild lavender is one of Elgato’s four new color options. | Image: Elgato
Elgato has released four new color options for its Stream Deck and other streaming accessories as part of a new Dreamscape collection designed to better match the aesthetic of a studio or gaming room. The devices and accessories have previously typically only been available in white or black, but are now available in forest green, pink petal, wild lavender, and glacier ice (a very light blue).
The Dreamscape collection is now available for the same price as the standard version of these products. The collection includes the $149.99 Stream Deck, the $169.99 Wave XLR microphone interface, the $99.99 Wave DX mic, the $149.99 Wave:3 mic, and the $99.99 Wave Mic Arm LP.
If you already have the Stream Deck or the Wave XLR and are feeling envious about the new color options, Elgato also sells a $14.99 faceplate for the Stream Deck in all four new shades, and a $19.99 one for the Wave XLR so you can update your existing gear.
Elgato is also selling its new Dreamscape collection in discounted bundles. The discounts range from two percent off if you buy two of them to 20 percent off if you bundle all five (not including the faceplates). You also don’t have to stick to just one color option when building a bundle. You can mix and match the new shades if you want to give your streaming setup a punch of color but aren’t worried about maintaining a uniform theme.
To complete the look, the company offers Dreamscape icons and button labels for the Stream Deck, available for download through the Elgato Marketplace, that complement the four new color options.
SteamOS rescues the Lenovo Legion Go S from utter failure. But is that enough? | Photo: Sean Hollister / The Verge
Valve's Steam Deck has dominated the handheld gaming PC space since its 2022 debut. But even as more powerful Windows handhelds arrived to keep up with more demanding games, none have beaten the Steam Deck's combination of ease-of-use, ergonomics, power, and battery life at an affordable price.
That still hasn't changed. The Lenovo Legion Go S with SteamOS is not the Steam Deck killer that some headlineswouldhave you believe.
Today, Waymo announced its own expansion — minus the puerile humor. It’s just a bigger map with more customers for the Alphabet-owned company’s budding robotaxi business. And more pressure on Tesla to drop the dick jokes and get serious about autonomous driving.
Waymo’s new map covers 90 square miles in Austin, which is an increase from the current 37-square-mile service area. New neighborhoods include Crestview, Windsor Park, Sunset Valley, Franklin Park, and more, as well as popular destinations like The Domain and McKinney Falls State Park. Waymo provided a map, with the old service area in dark blue and the new one in light blue.
In its announcement, Waymo stressed that it’s “the only fully autonomous, 24/7 experience for anyone in Austin,” a clear reference to Tesla’s limitations. Waymo’s vehicles are unsupervised and available at any time, while Tesla’s vehicles include a safety monitor in the passenger seat, only operate between 6AM and midnight, and are invite-only.
Still, this is one of the first times that Waymo is experiencing competition in one of its robotaxi cities, and the company clearly relishes the fight. Waymo also stressed “no waitlists or caveats” as part of its service, which is available exclusively on the Uber app.
Service area is a key metric in operating a robotaxi service. Companies tend to target denser areas with more customers and more desirable locations, while also keeping in mind that expanding too rapidly could compromise safety.
This is one of the first times that Waymo is experiencing competition in one of its robotaxi cities
Tesla’s robotaxis have already racked up a list of mistakes, and the presence of the safety monitor is a clear sign that the company isn’t confident enough in its technology to deploy its vehicles without supervision. Meanwhile, Austin residents have filed numerous complaints with the city about Waymo’s slow-moving, overly cautious vehicles. One customer got stuck inside a Waymo on a busy street. Still, there have been no serious safety incidents involving either company in Austin yet.
Embarrassing incidents are a certainty as more robotaxis hit the road and their service areas expand. But when it comes to scale, Waymo is the clear winner right now. The company has more than 1,500 vehicles in five major cities, including Los Angeles, San Francisco, Phoenix, and Atlanta. Tesla has said that it wants to expand to Arizona and California, though it has yet to apply for several required permits in the latter.
Waymo announced another major milestone earlier this week: 100 million miles of fully autonomous driving. Tesla said earlier this year that its customers have driven more than 3.5 billion miles while using the company’s Full Self-Driving feature — which requires human supervision at all times.
Wacom has announced the MovinkPad 11, an all-in-one Android-powered tablet for digital illustrators who want to draw on the go. Unlike other display drawing tablets in Wacom’s lineup, the $449 MovinkPad doesn’t need to be connected to a laptop or PC, placing it in direct competition with the Apple Pencil and iPad combo that’s proved incredibly popular with digital artists.
Unlike Apple’s iPad lineup, however, the 11.45-inch MovinkPad prioritizes digital drawing capabilities over typical activities you would use a tablet for. The MovinkPad features a 2200 x 1440p resolution display with touchscreen support and anti-glare etched glass to reduce reflections and fingerprints. While the Movink drawing tablet that Wacom launched last year features an OLED display, the MovinkPad uses an IPS screen. The display has a color performance of 16.7 million colors and a 99 percent sRGB color gamut coverage ratio.
At 10.5 x 7.2 x 0.3 inches, it’s slightly larger than the 11-inch iPad Air and weighs 1.3 pounds (588 grams) compared to Apple’s one-pound (460 grams) offering. The rest of the MovinkPad features would be fairly forgettable on a regular tablet: it runs on Android 14, features a 5 megapixel front camera, a 4.7 megapixel rear camera, dual microphones, stereo speakers, and support for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2 It also includes a USB-C port for charging and 7700mAh lithium-ion battery, but Wacom doesn’t mention what battery life you can expect from a single charge.
Under the hood, the MovinkPad 11 is powered by a MediaTek Helio G99 processor, the same mid-ranged chip used in the Lenovo Tab Plus that launched last year. The MovinkPad only comes with 8GB of memory and 128GB of storage, which can’t be expanded. That limitation isn’t ideal for a tablet that users will want to save a lot of image files without relying on cloud storage.
The MovinkPad supports the same 8,192 pressure levels and 60-degree pen tilt angles as Wacom’s main drawing display tablet lineup. It comes with the customizable Wacom Pro Pen 3, which includes a nib holder and customizable side switches, and supports a range of third-party digital pens from brands such as Dr. Grip, Lamy, and Staedtler.
That Android 14 support means that the MovinkPad can support a range of popular digital illustration apps that are available on the Google Play store, including Clip Studio Paint, Ibis Paint, and Krita, and comes with the Wacom Canvas sketching app pre-installed. iPads still have an edge here because Procreate — often ranked as the top creative app on Apple’s App Store — is an iOS exclusive for now, though Procreate developer James Cuda has mused on plans to bring it to other platforms eventually.
The MovinkPad 11 is a far cry from Wacom’s previous attempts to launch an all-in-one drawing tablet: the MobileStudio Pro series came with built-in PC hardware, which made it too heavy to lug around easily and cost up to $3,500, which also made it too expensive for hobbyist illustrators to consider.
At $449, the MovinkPad undercuts Wacom’s MobileStudio Pro line, but the cheapest A16 chip iPad ($349) is still a more affordable choice, even with the additional requirement to purchase a first-gen Apple Pencil ($99). Still, the Wacom Pro Pen 3 support and other illustration-focused goodies may give Wacom the opportunity to poach customers who were looking at Apple’s more expensive iPad models.
It's called simply Emoji Game, and each day you're presented with three phrases, which have some letters filled in, but are mostly blank. There's a partial hint as to …
Hello, and welcome to Decoder! I’m Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and author of the Command Line newsletter. I’m hosting our Thursday episodes while Nilay is out on parental leave.
Today, we’re talking about how AI is changing the way we use the web. If you’re like me, you’re probably already using apps like ChatGPT to search for things, but lately I’ve become very interested in the future of the web browser itself.
That brings me to my guest today: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is betting that the browser is where more useful AI will get built. His company just released Comet, an AI web browser for Mac and Windows that’s still in an invite-only beta. I’ve been using it, and it’s very interesting.
Aravind isn’t alone here: OpenAI is working on its own web browser, and then there are other AI native web browsers out there like Dia. Google, meanwhile, may be forced to spin off Chrome if the US Department of Justice prevails in its big antitrust case. If that happens, it could provide an opening for startups like Perplexity to win market share and fundamentally change how people interact with the web.
In this conversation, Aravind and I also discussed Perplexity’s future, the AI talent wars, and why he thinks people will eventually pay thousands of dollars for a single AI prompt.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Alright, Aravind, before we get into Comet and how it works, I actually want to go back to our last conversation in April for my newsletter Command Line. We were talking about why you were doing this, and you told me at the time that the reason we’re doing the browser is, “It might be the best way to build agents.”
That idea has stuck with me since then, and I think it’s been validated by others and some other recent launches. But before we get into things, can you just expand on that idea: Why do you think the browser is actually the route to an AI agent?
Sure. What is an AI agent? Let’s start from there. A rough description of what people want out of an AI agent is something that can actually go and do stuff for you. It’s very vague, obviously, just like how an AI chatbot is vague by definition. People just want it to respond to anything. The same thing is true for agents. It should be able to carry out any workflow end to end, from instruction to actual completion of the task. Then you boil that down to what does it actually need to do it? It needs context. It needs to pull in context from your third-party apps. It needs to go and take actions on those third-party apps on your behalf.
So you need logged in versions of your third-party apps. You need to access your data from those third-party apps, but do it in a way where it doesn’t actually constantly ask you to auth again and again. It doesn’t actually need your permission to do a lot of the things. At the same time, you can take over it and complete the things when it’s not able to do it because no AI agent is foolproof, especially when we are at a time when reasoning models are still far from perfection.
So you want this one interface that the agent and the human can both operate in the same manner: their logins are actually seamless, client-side data is easy to use, and controlling it is pretty natural, and nothing’s going to truly be damaging if something doesn’t work. You can still take over from the agent and complete it when you feel like it’s not able to do it. What is that environment in which this can be done in the most straightforward way without creating virtual servers with all your logins and having users worry about privacy and stuff like that? It’s the browser.
Everything can live on the client side, everything can stay secure. It only accesses information that it needs to complete the task in the literal same way you access those websites yourself, so that way you get to understand what the agent is doing. It’s not like a black box. You get full transparency and visibility, and you can just stop the agent when you feel like it’s going off the rails and just complete the task yourself, and you can also have the agent ask for your permission to do anything. So that level of control, transparency, trust in an environment that we are used to for multiple decades, which is the browser — such a familiar front end to introduce a new concept of AI is going and doing things for you — makes perfect sense for us to reimagine the browser.
How did you go about building Comet? When I first opened it, it felt familiar. It felt like Chrome, and my understanding is that it’s built on Chromium, the open-source substrate of Chrome that Google maintains, and that allows you to have a lot of easy data importing.
I was struck when I first opened it that it only took one click to basically bring all my context from Chrome over to Comet, even my extensions. So, why decide to go that route of building Comet on Chromium versus doing something fully from scratch?
First of all, Chromium is a great contribution to the world. Most of the things they did on reimagining tabs as processes and the way they’ve gone about security, encryption, and just the performance, the core back-end performance of Chromium as an engine, rendering engines that they have, is all really good. There’s no need to reinvent that. And at the same time, it’s an open-source project, so it’s easy to hire developers for Perplexity. They can work on the Comet browser, especially if it’s something that has open standards, and we want to continue contributing to Chromium also.
So we don’t want to just consume Chromium and build a product out of it, but we actually want to give back to the ecosystem. So that’s natural. And the second thing is, it’s the dominant browser right now.Chrome, and almost if you actually include Edge — which is also a Chromium fork — DuckDuckGo, Brave, they’re all Chromium forks, only Safari’s based on WebKit. So, it’s actually the dominant browser and there’s no need to reinvent the wheel here.
In terms of UI, we felt like it would be better to retain the most familiar UI people are already used to, which honestly is the Chrome UI. And Safari is a slightly different UI and some people like it, some people do not, and it’s still a much smaller share of the market. And imports need to work, otherwise you’re going to be like, ‘Oh, this is not working, oh, that thing doesn’t have all my personal contacts, I’m missing out on it. I don’t want to go through the friction of logging into all the apps again.’
I think that that was very important for us for the onboarding step, which is not only onboarding you as a human but also onboarding the AI. Because the moment you’re already logged into all the third-party apps that you are logged in on Chrome in the exact same security standards, the agent gets access to that on your client and can immediately show you the magic of the product.
And the agent is seeing it, but you, Perplexity, are not. You’re not using all of the Chrome data I instantly bring over to train on me or anything like that?
No. The agent only sees it when you ask a relevant prompt. For example, ‘Based on what I’ve ordered on Amazon in the last month, recommend me some new supplements’ or, ‘Go and order the magnesium supplement that I’ve already ordered frequently on Amazon.’ The agent only sees that for that one singular prompt and doesn’t actually store your entire Amazon history on our servers, and you can always ensure that your prompts get deleted from our servers.
So, even the prompts we can choose not to look at, even for fine-tuning purposes. Let’s say we want to make our agents good at an aggregate or like, users have done Amazon shopping queries, let’s go and make it better on that. We don’t even need to look at that if you choose to not retain your prompt. So that’s the level of privacy and security we want to offer.
At the same time, the frontier intelligence is all on the server side. This is one of the main reasons why Apple is struggling to ship all Apple Intelligence being on iOS or macOS or whatever, because I think there’s generally an expectation that everything needs to live on the client side. That’s not necessary to be private. You can still be pretty secure and private with frontier intelligence on the server. So that’s the architecture we brought in on Comet.
We are talking now a couple of weeks or so after Comet came out and it’s still invite-only — or I think it’s also restricted to your premium tier, your $200 a month tier — but you’ve been tweeting a lot of examples of how people have been using it. They’ve been using it to make Facebook ads, do FedEx customer support chat, run their smart home accessories, make Facebook marketplace listings, schedule calendar meetings, there’s been a lot of stuff that you’ve shown.
Unsubscribing from spam emails, which is a favorite use case of a lot of people.
So maybe that’s the one. But I was going to say, what has been the main use case you’ve seen so far that people are finding with Comet?
Actually, while these are the more glamorous use cases, I would say the boring dominant one is always invoking the sidecar and having it do stuff for you on the webpage you’re on. Not necessarily just simple summarization, but more complex questions. Let’s say I’m watching Alex Heath’s podcast with Zuckerberg or something and I want to know specifically what he said about a topic, and I want to take that and send it as a message to my teammates on Slack.
I think that’s the thing, you can just invoke the assistant on the site and do it instantly. It’s connected to your Gmail, your calendar. It’s also able to pull the transcript from the YouTube video. It has fine-grain access, and it’s immediately able to retrieve the relevant snippet. I can even ask it to play it from that exact timestamp instead of going through the entire transcript, like whatever I want. That is the level of advantage you have.
It almost feels like you should never watch a YouTube video standalone anymore unless you have a lot of time on your hands, and it’s fantastic. And people use it for LinkedIn. Honestly, searching over LinkedIn is very hard. It doesn’t have a working search engine, basically. So the agent figures out all these shortcuts, like how we figure out using these filters — people search, a connection search — and it’s able to give recruiting power that was never possible before. I would say it’s better than using LinkedIn Premium.
I’m glad you brought up the sidecar because for people who haven’t tried it or seen it, that is the main way Comet diverts from Chrome, is that you’ve got this AI assistant orchestration layer that sits on the side of a webpage that you can use to interact with the webpage and also just go off and do things.
That interface suggests that you see the web as being less about actually browsing. You just said no one really has time to watch a YouTube video and more about an action interface. Is the browsing part of the browser becoming less meaningful in the world of AI is what I’m wondering?
I think people are still going to watch YouTube videos for fun or exploration. But when I’m actually landing at a video — you do a lot of intellectual stuff, so it’s not always fun to watch the entire thing — but I like watching specific things in the video. And also, by the way, when I’m in the middle of work, I can’t be watching The Verge podcast. I want to instantly know what Zuckerberg might have said in your video about their cluster or something, and then on the weekend, I can go back and watch the entire thing. I might have a lot more time on my hands, so it’s not actually going to stop the regular browsing.
I actually think people are going to scroll through social platforms or watch Netflix or YouTube even more, I would say, because they have more time on their hands. The AI is going to do a lot of their work. It’s just that they would choose to spend it on entertainment more than intellectual work, so intellectual browsing. Or if people derive entertainment from intellectual stuff like intellectual entertainment, I think that’s fine, too.
Like reading books, all these things are fine, like reading blog posts that you otherwise wouldn’t get time to read when you’re in the middle of work. I think these are the kind of ways in which we want the browser to evolve where people launch a bunch of Comet assistant jobs, like tasks that would take a few minutes to complete in the background and they’re chilling and scrolling through X or whatever social media they like.
Your tagline for Comet is enabling people to “Browse at the speed of thought.” I find that there’s actually a very steep learning curve to understanding what it can do.
By the way, Alex, I want to make one point. There was some article either from The Verge or somewhere else that Google was trying to use Gemini to predict maximal engagement time on a YouTube video and show the ad around that timestamp. Perplexity on the Comet browser was using AI to exactly save your time, to get you the exact timestamp you want on a fine-grain basis and not waste your time. So often people ask, why would Google not do this and that? The incentives are completely different here.
And I want to get into that and I have a lot of business model questions about Comet because it is also very compute intensive for you and expensive to run, which you’ve talked about. But to my point about the learning curve and making it approachable, how do you do that? Because when I first opened it, it’s kind of like I don’t know what I can do with this thing. I mean, I go to your X account and I see all the things you’re sharing. But I do think there’s going to be a learning curve that the people building these products don’t necessarily appreciate.
No, no, I appreciate that and it’s been the thing for me, myself as a user is that even though it’s fun to build all these agent use cases, it takes a while to stop doing things the usual way and start using the AIs more, which includes even basic things like what reply you type onto an email thread. Even though Google has these automatic suggested replies, I don’t actually usually like it and it doesn’t often pull context from outside Gmail to help me do that. Or like checking on unread Slack messages. I usually just go open Slack as a tab and try to scroll through those 50, 100 channels I’m on, clicking each of those channels, reading all the messages that are unread. It takes time to actually train myself to use Comet. So what we plan to do is actually publish a lot of the early use cases on educational material and have it be widely accessible.
I think it’s going to go through the same trajectory that chatbots had. I think in the beginning when ChatGPT was launched, I’m sure not a lot of people knew how to use it. What are all the ways in which you could take advantage of it? In fact, I still don’t think people really… It’s not really a widespread thing. There are some people who really know how to use these AI tools very well and most people have used it at least once or twice a week, and they don’t actually use it in their day-to-day workflows.
The browser is going to go through a similar trajectory, but on the other hand, the one use case that’s been very natural, very intuitive that you don’t even have to teach people how to use this is the sidecar. It’s just picked up so much that I feel like it’ll be so intuitive. It’ll almost be like, without the sidecar, why am I using the browser anymore? That’s how it’s going to feel.
It does quickly make the traditional chatbot, the Perplexity or ChatGPT interface, feel a little arcane when you have the sidecar with the webpage.
Exactly, a lot of people are using ChatGPT for… You’re on an email and you want to know how to respond, so you copy / paste a bunch of context. You go there, you ask it to do something, and then you copy / paste it back. You edit it finally in your Gmail box or you do it in your Google Sheets or Google Docs. Comet is just going to feel much more intuitive. You have it right there on the side and you can do your edits, or you’re using it to draft a tweet, or Elon Musk posts something and you want to post a funny response to that. You can literally ask Comet, ‘Hey, draft me a funny reply tweet to that,’ and it’ll automatically have it ready for you. You literally have to click the post button.
All that stuff is going to definitely reduce the amount of times you really open another tab and keep asking the AI. And firing up jobs right from your current website to go pull up relevant context for you and having it just come back and push notify you when it’s ready, that’s feeling like another level of delegation.
Where is Comet struggling based on the early data you’ve seen?
It’s definitely not perfect yet for long-horizon tasks, something that might take 15 minutes or something. I’ll give you some examples. Like I want a list of engineers who have studied at Stanford and also worked at Anthropic. They don’t have to be currently working at Anthropic, but they must have worked at Anthropic at least once. I want you to give me an exhaustive list of people like that ported over to Google Sheets with their LinkedIn URLs, and I want you to go to ZoomInfo and try to get me their email so that I can reach out to them. I also want you to bulk draft personalized cold emails to each of them to reach out to for a coffee chat.
I don’t think Comet can do this today. It can do parts of it, so you still have to be the orchestrator stitching them together. I’m pretty sure six months to a year from now, it can do the entire thing.
You think it happens that quickly?
I’m betting on progress in reasoning models to get us there. Just like how in 2022, we bet on models like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 Sonnet to arrive to make the hallucination problem in Perplexity basically nonexistent when you have a good index and a good model. I’m betting on the fact that in the right environment of a browser with access to all these tabs and tools, a sufficiently good reasoning model — like slightly better, maybe GPT-5, maybe like Claude 4.5, I don’t know — could get us over the edge where all these things are suddenly possible and then a recruiter’s work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs. And then you’ve got to do state tracking.
It’s not just about doing this one task, but you want it to keep following up, keep a track of their responses. If some people respond, go and update the Google Sheets, mark the status as responded or in progress and follow up with those candidates, sync with my Google calendar, and then resolve conflicts and schedule a chat, and then push me a brief ahead of the meeting. Some of these things should be proactive. It doesn’t even have to be a prompt.
That’s the extent to which we have an ambition to make the browser into something that feels more like an OS where these are processes that are running all the time. And it’s not going to be easy to do all this today, but in general, we have been successful at identifying the sweet spots where things that are currently on the edge of working and we nail those use cases, get the early adopters to love the product, and then ride the wave of progress and reasoning models. That’s been the strategy.
I’m not sure if it’s just the reasoning models or it’s just the product’s early or I haven’t figured out how to use it correctly. My experience—
It’s not like I’m saying everything will work out of the box with a new model. You really have to know how to harness the capabilities and have the right evals and version control the prompts and do any post-training of auxiliary models, which is basically our expertise. We are very good at these things.
I would say that based on — and I’ll caveat that I haven’t spent weeks yet with it — but based on my early experience with it, I would describe it as a little brittle or unpredictable in terms of the success rate. I asked it to take me to the booking page for a very specific flight that I wanted and it did it. It took me to the page and it filled in some stuff, whereas the normal Perplexity or ChatGPT interface would just take me to the webpage. It actually took me a little bit further. It didn’t book it, but it took me further, which was good.
But then I asked it like, “Create a list of everyone who follows me on X that works at Meta,” and it gave me one person, and I know for a fact there’s many more than that. Or for example, I said, “Find my last interview with the CEO of Perplexity,” and it said it couldn’t, but then it showed a source link to the interview, so the answer said it but the source didn’t. I see some brittleness in the product and I know it’s early, but I’m just wondering is all of that just bugs or is that anything inherent in the models or the way you’ve architected it?
I can take a look at it if you can share the link with me, but I would say the majority of the advertised use cases that we ourselves advertised are things that are expected to work. Now, will it always 100 percent of the time work in a deterministic way? No. Are we going to get there in a matter of months? I think so, and you have to be timing yourself where you’re not exactly waiting for the moment where everything works reliably. You want to be a little early, you want to be a little edgy, and I think there are some people who just love feeling being part of the ride, too.
The majority of the users are going to wait until everything works stable, so that’s why we think the sidecar is already a value add for those kinds of people where they don’t have to use the agents that much. They can use the sidecar, they can use Gmail, they can use calendar connectors, they can use all those LinkedIn search features, YouTube, or just basic stuff like searching over your own history. These are things that already work well and this is already a massive value add over Chrome. And once several minutes’ worth of long-horizon tasks start working reliably, that’s going to make it feel more than just a browser. That’s when you make it feel like an OS. You want everything in that one container, and you’ll feel like the rest of the computer doesn’t even matter.
We started this conversation talking about how you think the browser gives you this context to be able to create an actually useful agent, and there’s this other technical path that the industry is looking at and getting excited about, which is MCP, model context protocol. And at a high level, it’s just this orchestration layer that lets an LLM talk to Airtable, Google Docs, whatever, and do things on your behalf in the same way that Comet is doing that in the sidecar.
You’re going at this problem through the browser and through the logged-in state of the browser that you talked about and that shortcut, while a lot of people — Anthropic and others, OpenAI — are looking at MCP as maybe the way that agents actually get built at scale. I’m curious what you think of those two paths, and are you just very bearish on MCP or do you think MCP is for other kinds of companies?
I’m not extremely bearish on MCP. I just want it to mature more, and I don’t want to wait. I want to ship agents right now. I feel like AI as a community, as an industry has just been talking about agents for the last two years and no one’s actually shipped anything that worked. And I got tired of that and we felt like the browser is a great way to do that today.
MCP is going to definitely play a contributing factor to the field in the next five years. There’s still a lot of security issues they need to figure out there. Having your authentication tokens communicated from your client to an MCP server or from a remote MCP server to another client, all these things are pretty risky today, way more risky than just having your persistent logins on your client on the browser. The same issues exist with OpenAI’s Operator, which tries to create server-side versions of all your apps.
I think there’s going to be some good MCP connectors that we’ll definitely integrate with Linear or Notion. I guess GitHub has an MCP connector. So whenever it makes sense to use those over an agent that just opens these tabs and scrolls through them and clicks on things, we’re going to use that. But it’s always going to be bottlenecked by how well these servers are maintained and how you orchestrate these agents to use the protocol in the right way. It doesn’t solve the search problem on those servers, by the way. You still have to go and figure out what data to retrieve.
You define it as the orchestration layer. It’s not the orchestration layer, it’s just a protocol for communicating between servers and the client, or one server or another server. But it’s still not solving the problem of reasoning and knowing what information to extract and knowing what actions to take and all that chaining together different steps, trying things when things don’t work. Whereas the browser is basically something that’s been designed for humans to actually operate in, and extracting a DOM and knowing what actions to take seems to be something that these models, the reasoning models, seem to be pretty good at.
So we are going to do a hybrid approach and see what works best. In the end, it has to be fast, it has to be reliable, and it has to be cheap. So if MCP lets us do that better than the browsing agent, then we’ll do that. There’s no dogmatic mission here.
At The Verge, we care a lot about the way our website looks and feels, the art of it, the visual experience, and with all this agent talk and it collapsing into browsers, I’m curious what you think happens to the web and to websites that devote a lot to making their sites actually interesting to browse. Does the web just become a series of databases that agents are crawling through MCP or whatever and this entire economy of the web goes away?
No. I actually think if you have a brand, people are going to be interested in knowing what that brand thinks, and it might go to you, the individual, or it might go to Verge, or it might go to both. It doesn’t matter. So even within Verge, I might not be interested in articles written by some other people. I might be interested in specific people who have data content or something. So I think the brand will play an even bigger role in a world where both AIs and humans are surfing the web, and so I don’t think it’s going to go away. Maybe the traffic for you might not even come organically. It might come through social media. Let’s say you publish a new article, some people might come click on it through Instagram or X or LinkedIn. It doesn’t matter.
And whether it would be possible for a new platform to build traffic from scratch by just doing the good old SEO tricks, I’m actually bearish on that. It’s going to be difficult to create your own presence by just playing the old playbook. You’ve got to build your brand through a different manner in this time period, and the existing ones who are lucky enough to already have a big brand presence, they have to maintain the brand also with a different playbook, not just doing SEO or traditional search engine growth tactics.
On Comet as a business, it’s very compute-intensive and it’s still invite-only. I imagine you wish you could just throw the gates open and let anyone use it, but it would melt your servers or your AWS bills, right? So how do you scale this thing? Not only do you scale it from the product sense and it becomes a thing that normal people can easily use and understand that curve of learning it that we talked about, but also just the business of it. You’re not profitable, you’re venture-backed, you have to make money one day, you have to be profitable. How do you scale something like this that is actually even more compute-intensive than a chatbot?
I think if the reliability of these agents gets good enough, you could imagine people paying usage-based pricing. You might not be part of the max subscription tier of $200 a month or anything, but there’s one task you really desperately want to get done and you don’t want to spend three hours doing that, and as long as the agent actually completes and you’re satisfied with the response rate, the success rate, you’ll be okay with trusting the agent to paying an advance fee of $20 for the recruiting task I described, like give me all the Stanford alumni who worked at Anthropic.
I think that is a very interesting way of thinking about it, which is otherwise going to cost you a lot more time or you have to hire a sourcing consultant, or you have to hire a full-time sourcer whose only job is that. If you value your time, you’re going to pay for it.
Maybe let me give you another example. You want to put an ad on Meta, Instagram, and you want to look at ads done by similar brands, pull that, study that, or look at the AdWords pricing of a hundred different keywords and figure out how to price your thing competitively. These are tasks that could definitely save you hours and hours and maybe even give you an arbitrage over what you could do yourself, because AI is able to do a lot more. And at scale, if it helps you to make a few million bucks, does it not make sense to spend $2,000 for that prompt? It does, right? So I think we’re going to be able to monetize in many more interesting ways than chatbots for the browser.
It’s still early, but the signs of life are already there in terms of what kind of use cases people have. And if you map reduce your cognitive labor in bulk to an AI that goes and does it reliably, it almost becomes like your personal AWS cluster with natural language-described tasks. And I think we have to execute on it, but if we do execute on it and if the reasoning models are continuing to work well, you could imagine something that feels more like Cloud Code for life. And Cloud Code is a product that people are paying $1,000 a month also because, even though it’s expensive, it helps you maybe get a promotion faster because you’re getting more work done and your salary goes up, and it feels like the ROI is there.
Are you betting so much on the browser for the next chapter of Perplexity because the traditional chatbot race has just been completely won by ChatGPT? Is Perplexity as it exists today going away and the future of it is just going to be Comet?
I wouldn’t say that I’m betting on it because the chatbot race is over. Let me decouple the two things. The chatbot race does seem like it’s over in the sense that it’s very unlikely that people think of another product for day-to-day chat. From the beginning, we never competed in that market. We were always competing on search. We were trying to reimagine search in the conversational style. Yes, every chatbot has search integrations. Some people like that, some people still like a more search-like interface that we have, so we never wanted to go after that market and we are not competing there either. Google is trying to catch up and Grok’s trying to catch up, Meta’s trying to catch up, but I feel like all that is wasted labor in my opinion at this point.
But the way I would phrase it is the browser is bigger than chat. It’s a more sticky product, and it’s the only way to build agents. It’s the only way to build end-to-end workflows. It’s the only way to build true personalization, memory, and context. And so it’s a bigger price in my opinion than trying to nail the chat game, especially in a market that’s so fragmented. And it’s a much harder problem to crack, too, in terms of intelligence, how you package it, how you context engineer it, how you deal with all the shortcomings at the current moment, as well as end-user-facing UX — which could be the front end, the back end, the security, the privacy, and all the other bugs that you’ get to deal with when working with a much more multifaceted product like the browser.
Do you think that’s why OpenAI is going to be releasing a browser? Because they agree with that?
I don’t know if they are. I’ve read the same leaks that you have, and it was very interesting it came two hours after we launched. You also made another point about Perplexity being ignored and Comet being the next thing. I don’t see it that way because you cannot build a browser without a search. A lot of people praised the Comet browser because it doesn’t feel like another browser. You know why? One of the main reasons is, of course we have the sidecar and we have the agent and all that, but the default search is Perplexity. And we made it in a way where even if you’re having an intent to navigate, it’ll understand that.
It’ll give you four or five links if it feels like it’s a navigational query, it’ll give you images pretty quickly. It’ll give you a very short answer also, so you can combine informational queries or navigational queries, agent queries in one single search box. That is only doable if you actually are working on the search problem, which we’ve been working on since the last two and a half years. So I would say I don’t see it as two separate things. Basically, you cannot build a product like Chrome without building Google. Similarly, you cannot build a product like Comet without building Perplexity.
So is there a Comet standalone mobile app and a standalone Perplexity app?
Yeah, there will be standalone apps for both. Some people are going to use the standalone Comet app just like how they use Chrome or Safari, and it’s okay. They probably won’t do that because it’s going to have an AI that you can talk to on every webpage, including in voice mode actually. But you still want to just navigate and get to a website quickly. I just want to go and browse Verge without actually having any question in my mind, that’s fine. And I could go to Perplexity and have all the other things the app has like Discover feeds and Spaces and just quick, fast answers without the web interface. That’s fine, too.
We are going to support a packaged version of the browser Comet within the Perplexity app, just like how the Google app still supports navigation like Chrome. So, by the way, both the Google app and the Chrome app are WebKit apps on iOS. Similarly, both the Google app and the Chrome app are Chromium apps on Android. We’ll have to follow the same trajectory.
Speaking of competition, I’m curious what you think of Dia, what The Browser Company has done. They released it around the same time as you, they’re moving in this direction as well. Obviously they’re a smaller startup, but they got a lot of buzz with Arc, their original browser, and now seem to be betting on the same idea that you have with Comet. I’m curious if you’ve gotten to try it or how you think it will stack up against Comet.
I haven’t tried it myself. I’ve seen what other people have said. I think they have some interesting ideas on the visuals on the front end. And if I were them, I would’ve just tried it in the same browser they had instead of going and trying to build distribution on a new one. But yeah, it’s interesting. We are definitely going to study every product out there. Our focus, though, more goes on Chrome. It is the big brother. And the way I think about it is even if I take 1 percent of the Chrome users, set their default as Comet, that’s a massive, massive win for us and a massive loss for them, too, by the way, because any ad revenue lost is massive at that scale.
Is word of mouth the main way you’re going to grow Comet or are you looking for distribution partnerships beyond that?
In the beginning, we’re going to do more word of mouth growth. It’s very powerful. It’s worked out well for us in the past with Perplexity itself, and we’re going to try to follow the same trajectory here. And luckily we have an installed base of Perplexity already of 30 to 40 million people. So even if we get a good chunk of those people to try out Comet and convert some of those people who tried it into setting it as default, it’ll already be a massive victory without relying on any distribution partnerships.
And then we’re obviously going to try seeing how to convert that progress into a partnership like Google has with a bunch of people. I just want to caveat that by saying it’s going to be extremely hard. We’ve spoken about this in the past where Google makes sure every Android phone has Google Chrome as a default browser and you cannot change that.
You lose a lot of money if you change that. And Microsoft makes sure every Windows laptop is coming with Edge as the default browser. Again, you cannot change that. You will lose a lot of money if you change that. Now the next step is okay, let them be the default browser, at least can you have your app as part of the Android or Windows build? You still cannot change that easily. Especially on Windows, it’s basically pretty impossible to convince large OEMs to change that. So they have all these agreements that are several years locked in, and you work with companies that plan for the device that they’re shipping two years in advance.
That’s their mode in some sense. It’s not even the product, it’s not even exactly in the distribution world, it’s more in the legalities of how they crafted these agreements, which is why I’m happy that the DOJ is at least looking into Google. And we’ve made a list of recommendations on that, and I hope something happens there.
Yeah, it may have forced a spinoff of Chrome, which would be really interesting and reset things. There’s a lot of people that think Apple should buy you. And Eddy Cue, one of their top execs, actually had some pretty nice things to say about you on the stand when he was there during the Google trial and said that you guys had talked about working together. Obviously you can’t talk about something that hasn’t been announced yet, especially with Apple, but yeah, what do you make of that and Apple?
I mean, I’m firstly honored by Eddy mentioning us in the trial as a product that he likes, and he’s heard from his circles that people like it. I would love to work with Apple on integrations with Safari or Siri or Apple Intelligence. It’s the one product that almost everybody loves using or it’s a status symbol. Everybody wants to graduate using an Apple device.
So I’m pretty sure that we share a lot of design aesthetics in terms of how we do things and how they do things. At the same time, my goal is to make Perplexity as big as possible. It’s definitely possible that this browser is so platform-agnostic that it can benefit Android and iOS ecosystems, Windows and Mac ecosystems, and we can be pretty big on our own just like Google was. Of course, Google owns Android, but you could imagine they would’ve been pretty successful if they just had the best search engine and the best browser and they didn’t actually own the platform either.
I and others also reported that Mark Zuckerberg approached you about potentially joining Meta and working on his reboot of their AI efforts. What was Zuck’s pitch? I’m curious. Tell me.
Zuck is awesome. He’s doing a lot of awesome things, and I think Meta has such a sticky product. It’s fantastic, and we look at that as an example of how it’s possible to build a large business without having any platform yourself.
Were you shocked by the numbers that Zuck is paying for top AI research? These nine-figure compensation offers. I think a lot of them are actually tied to Meta stock needing to increase for those numbers to be paid. So it’s actually pretty contingent on the business and not just guaranteed payouts, but still huge numbers.
Yeah, huge. And definitely, I was surprised by the magnitude of the numbers. Seems like it’s needed at this point for them, but at the same time, Elon and xAI have shown you don’t need to spend that much to train models competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic. So I don’t know if money alone solves every problem here.
You do need to have a team that works well together, has a proper mission alignment and milestones, and in some sense, failure is not an option for them. The amount of investment is so big and I feel like the way Zuck probably thinks is, ‘I’m going to get all the people, I’m going to get all the compute and I’m going to get all the milestones set up for you guys, but now it’s all on you to execute and if you fail, it’s going to look pretty bad on me so you better not fail.’ That’s probably the deal.
What are the second order effects to the AI talent market, do you think, after Zuck’s hiring spree?
I mean, it’s definitely going to feel like a transfer market now, right? Like an NBA or something. There’s going to be a few individual stars who are having so much leverage. And one thing I’ve noticed is Anthropic researchers are not the ones getting poached.
Mostly. He has poached some, but not as many.
Yeah. So it does feel like that’s something labs need to work on, which is truly aligning people on one mission. That money alone is not the motivator for them. And as the company, your company’s doing well, the stock is going up and you feel dopamine from working there every day. You’re encountering new kinds of challenges, you feel a lot of growth, you’re learning new things, and you’re getting richer, too, along the way. Why would you want to go?
Do you think strongly about getting Perplexity to profitability to be able to control your own destiny, so to speak?
Definitely, it’s inevitable. We want to do it before the IPO and we think we can IPO in 2028 or 9. I would like to IPO, by the way, just to be clear. I don’t want to stay private forever like some of the companies have chosen to do so. Even though it gives you advantages in M&As and decision-making power, I do think the publicity and the marketing you get from an IPO and the fact that people can finally invest in a search alternative to Google is a pretty massive opportunity for us to IPO.
But I don’t think it makes sense to IPO before hitting $1 billion in revenue and some profitability along the way. So that’s definitely something we want to get to in the next four or three years. But I don’t want to stunt our own growth and not be aggressive and try new things today.
Makes sense. So, you launched Perplexity, and it’s crazy that it’s already been just over three years now, and it was right around when ChatGPT first launched. It’s wild to think about everything we’ve talked about and that all this has happened in barely three years. So maybe this is an impossible question, but I want to leave you with this question. If you look out three years from now, you just talked about the IPO, which is interesting, but what does Perplexity look like three years from now?
I hope it becomes the one tool you think of when you want to actually get anything done. And it has a lot of deep connection to you because it synchronizes with all your context and proactively thinks on your behalf and truly makes your life a lot easier.
Alright, we’ll leave it there. Aravind, thanks.
Thank you.
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