This is a troll right by Aravind? $34B is nearly double the valuation of Perplexity. I find it hard to believe so called “multiple investment funds” agreed to pony up that much cash. Kind of childish by Aravind.
Lol not a chance, remember that they got into browsers because that's almost the same tech for web crawling. It's a core tech for their 1T mcap company
Genuis. The ultimate way to bypass all AI bot crawling blocks. Just make every chrome browser upload whatever they view to perplexity for training data^W^WAI summarizing.
"Here's what we're going to do. We're going to accept the offer."
".. Gavin, Chrome is our primary ad ingest platform. We just used it to kill adblockers. Why, exactly, would we sell it?"
"I understand your concern, I really do.
But we must not let ourselves be constrained by the limits of our profitability!
Consider a gorilla.
The board members look at the conference room doors in panic, but nothing happens
A magnificent remote cousin that all of us share, particularly you, Devone. A gorilla is a peaceful, pastoral creature. But, if you were to strike your chest in front of it, it'll rip your head off and stick so far up your ass you choke on it.
breathes heavily
The gorilla, ladies and gentlemen, is the American justice system. And nothing, nothing, provokes it more than buying stuff with no intention of paying for it.
We accept the bid and Perplexity, obviously, fails raising 35 billion. Then we file a complaint, keep Chrome, get the popcorn and let the gorilla of justice explain to the competition the finer points of contractual law.
Ladies and gentlemen. This was Gavin Belson.
bows
"
---
Three weeks later, on Bloomberg news
"And with me is Mr. Bildt, a representative of a coalition of activist investors that raised 35 billion dollars for the Perplexity purchase of Google Chrome. Mister Bildt, what prompted you to assist what many consider to be a disastrous and unlikely deal? Do you expect Perplexity to manage Chrome better than Google?"
"God no. Given Perplexity's track record, we expect them to run the browser into the ground in 3-4 months, a year tops. Chrome accounts for some 80% of web traffic today. With its effective monopoly gone, we expect to capitalize on what many of us call a Belson-less market"
I get the feeling this Perplexity guy is a mix of SBF the bitcoin dude with the Palantir guy but actually dreams to be early Elon, or a troll. Maybe another another deep state plant? If we really want to go that road..
Either way, how does Perplexity even envisions to become a stable business? Let alone buying the browser with +80% worldwide share.
I dislike tech monopolies but Chrome leaving Google would be most terrible thing ever, security wise.
Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).
Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
No core AI model, Its a wrapper, And valuation at $18 billion is just fabricated fake PR, After deep seek and other free Core AI models based AI tools it has no future and its CEO knows that is why he is just focusing on public stunts & then raising as much as he can and withdraw by packing massive paychecks to himself.
Hard to understand whether this is a positive or negative. Chrome is trampling the internet in favor of Google. Will Perplexity just make Chrome even worse than it is, or will they degrade Chrome's market share through incompetence? More competition in the browser space would be welcome, but I'm not optimistic.
This isn’t exactly projecting an image of solid leadership and thinking from Perplexity.
#32 on the list of “signs your company is in a bubble and better buckle up” is companies that lack solid business fundamentals themselves start offering to buy other companies, acting like somehow they’re going to fix them. Clean up your own house dudes.
Perplexity buying chrome would be a disaster, it just feels that way. Every vibe I got from that company is not good. They would commercialize every aspect of the browser so fast, as in insert ads everywhere. Again I just get that vibe.
29 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 55.0 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44877656 ("Perplexity Makes Longshot $34.5B Offer for Chrome (wsj.com)"—115 comments)
https://abc.xyz/assets/34/fa/ee06f3de4338b99acffc5c229d9f/20...
".. Gavin, Chrome is our primary ad ingest platform. We just used it to kill adblockers. Why, exactly, would we sell it?"
"I understand your concern, I really do. But we must not let ourselves be constrained by the limits of our profitability!
Consider a gorilla. The board members look at the conference room doors in panic, but nothing happens A magnificent remote cousin that all of us share, particularly you, Devone. A gorilla is a peaceful, pastoral creature. But, if you were to strike your chest in front of it, it'll rip your head off and stick so far up your ass you choke on it. breathes heavily
The gorilla, ladies and gentlemen, is the American justice system. And nothing, nothing, provokes it more than buying stuff with no intention of paying for it.
We accept the bid and Perplexity, obviously, fails raising 35 billion. Then we file a complaint, keep Chrome, get the popcorn and let the gorilla of justice explain to the competition the finer points of contractual law.
Ladies and gentlemen. This was Gavin Belson. bows "
---
Three weeks later, on Bloomberg news
"And with me is Mr. Bildt, a representative of a coalition of activist investors that raised 35 billion dollars for the Perplexity purchase of Google Chrome. Mister Bildt, what prompted you to assist what many consider to be a disastrous and unlikely deal? Do you expect Perplexity to manage Chrome better than Google?"
"God no. Given Perplexity's track record, we expect them to run the browser into the ground in 3-4 months, a year tops. Chrome accounts for some 80% of web traffic today. With its effective monopoly gone, we expect to capitalize on what many of us call a Belson-less market"
Either way, how does Perplexity even envisions to become a stable business? Let alone buying the browser with +80% worldwide share.
Google has become the benevolent dictator of the web, if you like it or not. We get secure browsers, performance improvements, stable implementations at the cost of one bad feature being shipped a year (like Manifest V3).
Mozilla/FOSS community has fucked up Firefox, big time, which is not even their fault as they cannot hire thousands of six-figure developers.
#32 on the list of “signs your company is in a bubble and better buckle up” is companies that lack solid business fundamentals themselves start offering to buy other companies, acting like somehow they’re going to fix them. Clean up your own house dudes.