AI Startup Perplexity Faces Backlash for Allegedly Copying Forbes Content Without Permission

“It’s a case study in where we’re heading,” Lane told the AP. “If the people who are leading the charge don’t have a fundamental respect for the hard work of doing proprietary reporting, and keeping people informed with value-added content, we’ve got a big problem.”

A self-described “AI bull” who believes that the technology could help make many news organizations more efficient, Lane said the dispute between Perplexity and Forbes is important because it is a “metaphor for what can happen if the people controlling the AI don’t respect the people doing the work.”

Perplexity bills itself as a search engine while “acting like a media company and publishing a story” that only Forbes had reported, Lane said.

“The whole thing was very disingenuous. And what we didn’t hear was, ‘Oops, yeah we messed that one up and we need to do better,’” he said. “Instead, it was just putting out more content, little tweaks to the model and treating journalism like it’s just a commodity to be manufactured.”

Srinivas, a computer scientist and former AI researcher at OpenAI and Google, co-founded Perplexity in the summer of 2022, not long before the AI image-generator Stable Diffusion and OpenAI’s ChatGPT began sparking the public’s fascination with the possibilities of generative AI.

Inspired, in part, by his childhood love of Wikipedia, he described Perplexity to the AP as “like a marriage of Wikipedia and ChatGPT” that can instantly answer a person’s questions without the “huge cluttered mess” of Google’s conventional search results.

“You ask a question, you get an answer with clean sources, and there’s like three or four suggested (follow-up) questions and that’s it,” he said of Perplexity. “That way people’s minds can be free from distractions, and they can just focus on learning and digging deeper.”

The company sells a subscription for premium features and is planning to start an advertising-based service as it grows its user base.

“We are not profitable as a company today, but we are also more sustainably run than foundation model companies because we do not train our own foundation models,” which requires huge amounts of computing power, he said.

Perplexity relies on existing AI large language models such as those built by OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook; and then “post-trains” them.

“We shape them to be really good summarizers,” he said.