27. Perplexity
Built by alumni from OpenAI, Meta, and Quora, Perplexity AI is attempting to create the next generation of search engines by combining generative AI with the internet.
In April, it expanded into new territory through a deal with Motorola, allowing it to widen its user base. Its technology will be included in Motorola's "Moto AI" capabilities. While not the first AI-powered search engine to partner with smartphones, it now is in direct competition with Apple and OpenAI's Siri-ChatGPT integration which was announced in December 2024.
″Search shouldn't be about endless links and ads — it should give the user directly what they want, and we think the best way to do that is through an answer engine," Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said at a New York launch event. "Your phone is now an answer machine, personal assistant and a research agent."
Instead of pulling up links, Perplexity is essentially a hybrid between a chatbot and a search engine. It offers answers sourced directly from the Web, which it summarizes using large language models (LLMs). The platform's signature feature is its commitment to citation-backed responses, which not only provides context but factual backing. By the end of 2024, Perplexity was answering 20 million questions a day, according to the company.
The company's freemium model allows public access, and last year it added advertising. Brand partners like Indeed and Whole Foods joined the program, and it also launched a Publisher Program with partners like TIME, The Independent, and Fortune. It also has a paid tier that gives faster responses, PDF interpretation, and features like image generation. Its Enterprise Pro customers lean towards the finance and tech sphere, but it also works with other companies including CMA CGM, Nvidia, and the Cleveland Cavaliers. The company pulls in about $100 million in annual recurring revenue, sources told CNBC.
In May, it linked up with PayPal for an AI chat-based shopping feature that allows for booking travel, buying products and securing concert tickets on Perplexity's chat interface, paying instantly with PayPal or Venmo.
It has also made some bold moves this year, entering a bid in January to merge with TikTok under a company called NewCo. The deal would combine Perplexity and TikTok U.S., and would allow for the U.S. government to own up to 50 percent of the new company contingent upon a future IPO. In March, it laid out its TikTok vision in a blog post.
Because Perplexity depends on external sources it, like many web-based generative AI services, it can easily be swayed by the bias of the content it finds. Misinformation, or SEO-tailoring, can easily be taken as fact without additional checks. Despite this, Perplexity is gaining traction. It's backed by prominent investors including New Enterprise Associates, SoftBank Vision Fund, Jeff Bezos and Daniel Gross, a former Apple executive whose own search engine startup was acquired by the device giant.
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10 minutes ago
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Minnesota sues TikTok, alleging it preys on young people with addictive algorithms
ST. PAUL, Minn. (AP) — Minnesota on Tuesday joined a wave of states suing TikTok, alleging the social media giant preys on young people with addictive algorithms that trap them into becoming compulsive consumers of its short videos. 'This isn't about free speech. I'm sure they're gonna holler that," Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said at a news conference. "It's actually about deception, manipulation, misrepresentation. This is about a company knowing the dangers, and the dangerous effects of its product, but making and taking no steps to mitigate those harms or inform users of the risks.' The lawsuit, filed in state court, alleges that TikTok is violating Minnesota laws against deceptive trade practices and consumer fraud. It follows a flurry of lawsuits filed by more than a dozen states last year alleging the popular short-form video app is designed to be addictive to kids and harms their mental health. Minnesota's case brings the total to about 24 states, Ellison's office said. Many of the earlier lawsuits stemmed from a nationwide investigation into TikTok launched in 2022 by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from 14 states into the effects of TikTok on young users' mental health. Ellison, a Democrat, said Minnesota waited while it did its own investigation. Sean Padden, a middle-school health teacher in the Roseville Area school district, joined Ellison, saying he has witnessed a correlation between increased TikTok use and an 'irrefutable spike in student mental health issues,' including depression, anxiety, anger, lowered self-esteem and a decrease in attention spans as they seek out the quick gratification that its short videos offer. The lawsuit comes while President Donald Trump is still trying to broker a deal to bring the social media platform, which is owned by China's ByteDance, under American ownership over concerns about the data security of its 170 million American users. While Trump campaigned on banning TikTok, he also gained more than 15 million followers on the platform since he started sharing videos on it. No matter who ultimately owns TikTok, Ellison said, it must comply with the law. TikTok disputed Minnesota's allegations. 'This lawsuit is based on misleading and inaccurate claims that fail to recognize the robust safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support the well-being of our community," company spokesperson Nathaniel Brown said in a statement. "Teen accounts on TikTok come with 50+ features and settings designed to help young people safely express themselves, discover and learn. "Through our Family Pairing tool, parents can view or customize 20+ content and privacy settings, including screen time, content filters, and our time away feature to pause a teen's access to our app,' Brown added. Minnesota is seeking a declaration that TikTok's practices are deceptive, unfair or unconscionable under state law, a permanent injunction against those practices, and up to $25,000 for each instance in which a Minnesota child has accessed TikTok. Ellison wouldn't put a total on that but said, 'it's a lot.' He estimated that 'hundreds of thousands of Minnesota kids' have TikTok on their devices. 'We're not trying to shut them down, but we are insisting that they clean up their act,' Ellison said. 'There are legitimate uses of products like TikTok. But like all things, they have to be used properly and safely.' Minnesota is also among dozens of U.S. states that have sued Meta Platforms for allegedly building features into Instagram and Facebook that addict people. The messaging service Snapchat and the gaming platform Roblox are also facing lawsuits by some other states alleging harm to kids. Steve Karnowski, The Associated Press
NBC News
13 minutes ago
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What's behind the TikTok accounts using AI-generated versions of real Latino journalists?
A network of nearly 90 TikTok accounts has been using artificial intelligence to create fake versions of high-profile Spanish-language journalists and spread falsehoods online for potential financial gain. Over a third of the accounts used AI-generated versions of Jorge Ramos, one of the best-known Latino journalists in the United States, to front fabricated news stories. One of them featured an AI avatar of Ramos falsely claiming that President Donald Trump's son Barron Trump stormed into the United Nations to denounce the deportation of his mother, first lady Melania Trump. "I never said that," Ramos himself said in Spanish last month when he debunked the false narrative in a TikTok video posted on the account of this new independent news program. Ramos launched the show, 'Así Veo las Cosas,' on social media this year following his exit from Univision in December after nearly 40 years at the network. "There are things that are impossible to stop, and we can't stop artificial intelligence right now," Ramos said in his video. "There are tons of videos of me where I'm supposedly saying things I have never said." The accounts point to the challenge of stopping or controlling the surge in fake images and misinformation as AI technology advances and is increasingly used by those who want to spread false information online. Alexios Mantzarlis, director of the Security, Trust, and Safety Initiative at Cornell Tech, Cornell University's graduate campus in New York City, found 88 TikTok accounts that routinely used AI-generated versions of Ramos and other Latino news anchors from the Spanish-language networks Telemundo and Televisa to spread misinformation online targeting Spanish-speaking audiences in the United States. NBC News reviewed the contents of the 88 accounts before TikTok shut them down after it learned of Mantzarlis' findings. Most of the 88 accounts were created this year and used AI avatars of Ramos, Noticias Telemundo and NBC News anchor José Díaz-Balart and Televisa anchor Enrique Acevedo. (Telemundo and NBC News are owned by NBCUniversal, a subsidiary of Comcast Corp.) Their AI avatars, some of which were more realistic than others, were used to front false stories about divisive topics such as immigration, as well as conspiracy theories about Trump, Jeffrey Epstein and Sean "Diddy" Combs. The most recent videos posted by the now-deleted accounts had the AI avatars talk about a fabricated story of an orca attack that went viral and a nonexistent curfew for children based on a false law authorizing the abduction of children in the United States. The comments on a video about the false storyline fronted by Acevedo's AI avatar showed that while some users seem to have identified the content as false, other expressed distress over it, suggesting they believed the misinformation being spread. "These deepfakes hijack my voice, my image, and — more importantly — the trust I've built with audiences over the years. I'm leaning on transparency, calling them out publicly, but the scale of this threat is bigger than any one journalist," Acevedo told Mantzarlis, who wrote about his findings on his . A TikTok spokesperson told NBC News in a statement that the company 'banned these accounts for violating our Community Guidelines and continue[s] to vigilantly protect our platform from harmful misinformation and deceptive AI-generated content." Mantzarlis said there are probably hundreds more such accounts on the platform. He first began researching the trend more than six months ago. In March, Mantzarlis discovered a network of nearly 40 TikTok accounts posing as Telemundo and Univision that used AI-generated content and the voices of well-known professional journalists to spread misinformation about topics that tend to go viral on social media. The accounts went undetected for about a month before TikTok shut them down. But the trends Mantzarlis found on TikTok have evolved as more social media platforms integrate AI tools into their apps, making it easier to generate credible AI avatars, he told NBC News. Based on his research, Mantzarlis said the creators behind such TikTok accounts are constantly trying different ways to generate content that creates large viewership numbers to accumulate at least 10,000 followers — which is the minimum required to monetize videos under TikTok's Creator Rewards Program. The creators have 'determined that sensationalist news in Spanish, targeting a U.S. audience, does numbers, so they'll try to feed that niche,' he said. That's why some of them have even used AI-generated versions of non-native Spanish speakers — including a Brazilian journalist and comedians from 'The Daily Show,' an American satirical TV program — to spread Spanish-language misinformation. Mantzarlis said he found "very strong evidence" suggesting that such TikTok accounts are being built up to garner enough followers to monetize their videos. The monetized TikTok accounts are then sold to other people "who can change the topic and theme and find another niche' they can profit from. Mantzarlis found an encrypted chat group managed by Brazilian TikTok creators who claimed to sell monetized social media accounts that came pre-loaded with AI-generated clickbait content. In it, he saw someone claim to be selling a monetized TikTok account named "Tv Telemundo" for 300 Brazilian reals, or about $55. The account had posted AI-generated news and religious content to gain 11,000 followers under the previous name. The account now shares AI-generated wellness content. Marta Planells, Telemundo's vice president of digital news and streaming, told NBC News that the network has been reporting TikTok accounts impersonating Telemundo and their anchors for over a year. Once the accounts are reported, Planells said, TikTok has been proactive in shutting them down. But when that happens, more accounts come up, she added. Even after Mantzarlis published his research last week based on the initial sample of 88 TikTok accounts, he found six other accounts publishing misinformation fronted by AI avatars of real Latino journalists. TikTok also shut down those accounts. TikTok did not tell NBC News whether any of the accounts Mantzarlis identified were part of the Creator Rewards Program. TikTok claimed in a company report published this year to have proactively removed more than 94% of the content that it identified as violating its policies about AI-generated content and misinformation. Despite the efforts to remove false content, Ramos still encouraged his followers on TikTok to remain "vigilant, because misinformation is everywhere." "There are tons and tons of fake videos that appear to be real," he said. "This, of course, creates a lot of confusion."
13 minutes ago
Minnesota sues TikTok, alleging it preys on young people with addictive algorithms
ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Minnesota on Tuesday joined a wave of states suing TikTok, alleging the social media giant preys on young people with addictive algorithms that trap them into becoming compulsive consumers of its short videos. 'This isn't about free speech. I'm sure they're gonna holler that," Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said at a news conference. "It's actually about deception, manipulation, misrepresentation. This is about a company knowing the dangers, and the dangerous effects of its product, but making and taking no steps to mitigate those harms or inform users of the risks.' The lawsuit, filed in state court, alleges that TikTok is violating Minnesota laws against deceptive trade practices and consumer fraud. It follows a flurry of lawsuits filed by more than a dozen states last year alleging the popular short-form video app is designed to be addictive to kids and harms their mental health. Minnesota's case brings the total to about 24 states, Ellison's office said. Many of the earlier lawsuits stemmed from a nationwide investigation into TikTok launched in 2022 by a bipartisan coalition of attorneys general from 14 states into the effects of TikTok on young users' mental health. Ellison, a Democrat, said Minnesota waited while it did its own investigation. Sean Padden, a middle-school health teacher in the Roseville Area school district, joined Ellison, saying he has witnessed a correlation between increased TikTok use and an 'irrefutable spike in student mental health issues,' including depression, anxiety, anger, lowered self-esteem and a decrease in attention spans as they seek out the quick gratification that its short videos offer. The lawsuit comes while President Donald Trump is still trying to broker a deal to bring the social media platform, which is owned by China's ByteDance, under American ownership over concerns about the data security of its 170 million American users. While Trump campaigned on banning TikTok, he also gained more than 15 million followers on the platform since he started sharing videos on it. No matter who ultimately owns TikTok, Ellison said, it must comply with the law. TikTok disputed Minnesota's allegations. 'This lawsuit is based on misleading and inaccurate claims that fail to recognize the robust safety measures TikTok has voluntarily implemented to support the well-being of our community," company spokesperson Nathaniel Brown said in a statement. "Teen accounts on TikTok come with 50+ features and settings designed to help young people safely express themselves, discover and learn. "Through our Family Pairing tool, parents can view or customize 20+ content and privacy settings, including screen time, content filters, and our time away feature to pause a teen's access to our app,' Brown added. Minnesota is seeking a declaration that TikTok's practices are deceptive, unfair or unconscionable under state law, a permanent injunction against those practices, and up to $25,000 for each instance in which a Minnesota child has accessed TikTok. Ellison wouldn't put a total on that but said, 'it's a lot.' He estimated that 'hundreds of thousands of Minnesota kids' have TikTok on their devices. 'We're not trying to shut them down, but we are insisting that they clean up their act,' Ellison said. 'There are legitimate uses of products like TikTok. But like all things, they have to be used properly and safely.'
