AI: Another AI 'David' emerges

...Perplexity takes on Google to redo 'AI Search'

An evergreen aspect about every technology wave is how entrepreneurs dream and dare to take on new possibilities with un-ending fountains of innovation. The AI Tech Wave is no different, even though this time the majority of the the early focus in 2023 has been around the big cap tech companies, aka ‘The Magnificent 7’. And that’s of course because the early phase of exponential LLM AI building involves massive amounts of capital measured in the tens and hundreds of billions of dollars. Per company at times over time.

It’s what I’ve termed the ‘mainframe’ aspect of this AI Tech Wave, where the underlying hardware and software infrastructure involves massive amounts of upfront investment to set the foundations of the AI tech stack.

But there’s a lot of possible innovation to be built on top of this infrastructure, and that of course is not just for the big tech companies. It’s also prime seeding ground for new opportunities. New David vs Goliath stories as well.

One example this week is a year old AI company called Perplexity. As Stephanie Palazzolo of The Information introduces them:

“This One-Year-Old Startup Is Hoping to be the Next Google—Can It Succeed?”

“It’s not often that a young startup takes on a 25-year-old, $1.8 trillion tech behemoth. But for Aravind Srinivas, cofounder and CEO at Perplexity AI, that’s just an average Tuesday.”

“Perplexity is hoping to create the next Google Search, infused with generative AI. The one-year-old startup has raised $100 million to fund that mission, most recently from IVP at a $520 million valuation. (We previously scooped the round here, and featured the company in our 50 Most Promising Startups list.)”

“I’ve been testing out Perplexity’s search engine for the past few months, and it has many of the features that I’ve found missing in alternatives like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing. Its answers are concise and to the point, it includes citations to articles to back up its statements, and it doesn’t have an overly cutesy, distracting personality.”

They had me at ‘doesn’t have an overly curesy, distracting personality’, a topic I discussed at length this Sunday on ‘artificial emotions’ in ‘artificial intelligence’.

The whole piece is worth reading, especially on the pain points the company is focusing on, that isn’t just the province for bigger tech companies.

As Nvidia founder/CEO Jensen Huang recently discussed, tech startup founders take unnatural leaps of faith when they start new companies:

“When he sat down in a booth at his local Denny’s and began plotting out the business that would change his life, Jensen Huang didn’t know that his startup would one day be worth $1 trillion. In fact, the only chief executive in Nvidia’s history didn’t know much of anything about what he was getting himself into.”

“But if he had known three decades ago what he knows today, he never would have founded one of the world’s most valuable companies.”

“The reason for that is really quite simple,” Huang said recently. “Building Nvidia turned out to have been a million times harder than I expected.” 

The media and the public of course is perpetually enamored with the ‘David vs Goliath’ aspects of these stories. And of course the ‘Tortoise vs the Hare’ aspects sometimes involving Goliath vs Goliath stories as well.

But even at these earliest days of the AI Tech Wave, it’s good to see new entrepreneurs taking on big odds to do things ‘million times harder then expected’. Stay tuned.

(NOTE: The discussions here are for information purposes only, and not meant as investment advice at any time. Thanks for joining us here)