The artificial intelligence search engine Perplexity raised funds that valued it at $18 billion, intensifying fears of an AI bubble.
The latest valuation is a huge increase on Jan. 2024, when the firm was estimated to be worth $500 million.
Perplexity’s latest investment round came as Torsten Sløk, asset manager Apollo’s chief economist, said the S&P 500’s biggest firms were “more overvalued than they were in the 1990s.” The 2000 dotcom crash wiped $5 trillion off the stock market, so if Sløk is right, it could mean “the mother of all market crashes,” The Information said.
Still, even if AI is a bubble, it still matters: The dotcom crash did not lead to the end of the internet.