We need to get data from outside the app, said the CEO.
The AI company Perplexity said that they were developing their focus on AI and were making their browser Comet back in February. Aravind Srinivas, their CEO, discussed the company’s reasons for doing so in a recent TBPN podcast. The main reason is they will collect data about what users do on their browser, and then sell that information to advertisers; “That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you,” he said. “We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there.”
If that strategy sounds familiar, Google's Chrome browser has been taking a similar approach. Comet is built on top of Chromium, the open-source browser tech from Google. It is not out of the question that Perplexity would seize the opportunity to go directly to the source and buy Chrome outright following the recent antitrust ruling against Google in its search business. In the ongoing hearings about Google and its potential sale of Chrome, Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said he thought Perplexity would be able to continue running the browser at its current scale. Remarkably, he was not interested in selling it to OpenAI.
