The News
Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas announced Wednesday the company’s Comet web browser would soon be free for all users. The move was surprising because the browser’s capabilities undoubtedly burn through a significant amount of compute power, making it an expensive rollout.
The autonomous, agentic features of the browser are also coming to mobile, he said, in the form of an app that allows voice interaction.
In this article:
Reed’s view
I mentioned to Srinivas that I’m often frustrated by the voice modes in other chatbots because the capabilities are significantly reduced. For instance, Google’s Gemini Live can’t even access the most up-to-date information on the web, much less complete tasks for you.
Srinivas, who often jabs the search engine giant, made an interesting point. If Google were to roll out the same features for free to its billions of users, there may not be enough compute in the world to handle the inference demand. It’s another way Google’s AI ambitions are complicated by its existing businesses and sheer size.
While it opens up a lane for startups to break through, it’s also a reminder that the economics of AI are still being sorted out. Even OpenAI and Anthropic are often right on the edge of maxing out their ability to serve their customers.
In the meantime, I’m looking forward to rattling off a bunch of tasks for Perplexity’s new “background assistant” while I’m driving to and from meetings, no matter how many GPUs I melt in the process.
Notable
- Keeping the browser free is also a way for Peplexity to combat the AI “slop” that is flooding the internet, Business Insider reported. “We want to build a better internet, and that needs to be accessible to everybody,” Srinivas told the outlet.