Sundar Pichai Seems to Care Less About Perplexity AI

Google recently introduced Gemini Ultra, its most advanced LLM to date. During an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Google chief Sundar Pichai said that prior to the emergence of Perplexity AI, Google had already been leveraging AI for search. "We continuously evolve search. People often take it for granted, but we began answering questions using AI in search as early as 2014 through snippets,' said Pichai.

Pichai said that Google is experimenting with generative AI for search through the 'search generative experience.' Furthermore, he added that people still prefer using traditional search. "We are the only ones doing it in a way where users not only look at AI summaries but also care about the richness and diversity on the web,” he said.

"Gemini is integrated into search. Users now have the flexibility to seamlessly go back and forth, incorporating Gemini within search," he added.

For the past few months, Perplexity AI has been considered a threat to Google Search. "The desire to compete with Google is less about gaining search market share. That's probably true for Microsoft, but not for OpenAI or Perplexity. It's more about striving for engineering excellence and creating experiences that weren't possible before," wrote Perplexity Chief Aravind Srinivasa on X.

Interestingly, recently, Srinivas also posted a photo with Satya Nadella that said, 'Let’s make them dance' in response to another post discussing how Perplexity will make Google dance.The 16-month-old startup recently acquired funding of $73.6 million from NVIDIA and even Jeff Bezos, and is also backed by Nat Friedman, Andrej Karpathy, Yann LeCun, Elag Gil, Naval Ravikant, and several others

Perplexity AI has recently launched its app for Apple Vision Pro and forged a partnership with Brilliant Labs to address user queries through AR glasses.