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Business Insider
19-05-2025
- Business
- Business Insider
Marc Andreessen says the US needs to lead open-sourced AI: 'Imagine if the entire world — including the US — runs on Chinese software'
"Just close your eyes," the cofounder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz said in an interview on tech show TBPN published on Saturday. "Imagine two states of the world: One in which the entire world runs on American open-source LLM, and the other is where the entire world, including the US, runs on all Chinese software." Andreessen's comments come amid an intensifying US-China tech rivalry and a growing debate over open- and closed-source AI. Open-source models are freely accessible, allowing anyone to study, modify, and build upon them. Closed-source models are tightly controlled by the companies that develop them. Chinese firms have largely favored the open-source route, while US tech giants have taken a more proprietary approach. Last week, the US issued a warning against the use of US AI chips for Chinese models. It also issued new guidelines banning the use of Huawei's Ascend AI chips globally, citing national security concerns. "These chips were likely developed or produced in violation of US export controls," the US Commerce Department's Bureau of Industry and Security said in a statement on its website. As the hardware divide between the US and China deepens, attention is also on software and AI, where control over the underlying models is increasingly seen as a matter of technological sovereignty. Andreessen said it's "plausible" and "entirely feasible" that open-source AI could become the global standard. Companies would need to "adjust to that if it happens," he said, adding that widespread access to "free" AI would be a "pretty magical result." Still, for him, the debate isn't just about access. It's about values — and where control lies. Andreessen said he believes it's important that there's an American open-source champion or a Western open-source large language model. A country that builds its own models also shapes the values, assumptions, and messaging embedded in them. "Open weights is great, but the open weights, they're baked, right?" he said. "The training is in the weights, and you can't really undo that." For Andreessen, the stakes are high. AI is going to "intermediate" key institutions like the courts, schools, and medical systems, which is why it's "really critical," he said. Andreessen's firm, Andreessen Horowitz, backs Sam Altman's OpenAI and Elon Musk's xAI, among other AI companies. The VC did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider. Open source vs closed source China has been charging ahead in the open-source AI race. While US firms focused on building powerful models locked behind paywalls and enterprise licenses, Chinese companies have been giving some of theirs away. In January, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek released R1, a large language model that rivals ChatGPT's o1 but at a fraction of the cost, the company said. The open-sourced model raised questions about the billions spent training closed models in the US. Andreessen earlier called it "AI's Sputnik moment." Major players like OpenAI — long criticized for its closed approach — have started to shift course. "I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open source strategy," Altman said in February. In March, OpenAI announced that it was preparing to roll out its first open-weight language model with advanced reasoning capabilities since releasing GPT-2 in 2019. In a letter to employees earlier this month announcing that the company's nonprofit would stay in control, Altman said: "We want to open source very capable models." The AI race is also increasingly defined by questions of national sovereignty. Huang said countries should ensure they own the production of their intelligence and the data produced and work toward building "sovereign AI."
India Today
25-04-2025
- Business
- India Today
Perplexity AI is building its own browser to collect your data and show targeted ads
AI company Perplexity's CEO Aravind Srinivas has announced in a recent interview with TBPN hosts John Coogan and Jordi Hays that the company is working on its own browser called Comet. Srinivas says that the idea is that the company wants to collect user data even outside the Perplexity app. "We want to get data even outside the app to better understand you," he says with the data that the company collects on users outside the app, it wants to show users targeted ads. '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' the Perplexity CEO says that the Comet browser will likely be out sometime next month. He said during the interview that it should have been out by now but the company was facing some delays because they underestimated the complexity of building a browser. However, he says the browser should be out by mid-May. Perplexity plans about launching its own browser are interesting to say the least. First, the strategy of collecting user data to show targeted ads is very similar to Google's approach with the Chrome browser. Second, the Comet browser is also based on Chromium, which is the open-source platform that powered several browsers like Arc, Opera, and Mozilla finally, in the ongoing Google vs US Department of Justice monopoly trial, Perplexity was one of the companies that showed interest in buying Chrome in case Google is forced to divest the search browser. Perplexity's chief business officer, Dmitry Shevelenko has said that the company will be able to run Chrome at its current scale without compromising on the quality of the product or introducing any new costs. Google is in the middle of a search monopoly trial where in the US court could potentially break up the company and force Google to sell Yahoo and OpenAI are also bidding for the Chrome browser if it becomes available for purchase. Perplexity has been quite busy this week. The company debuted its AI chatbot as the default AI assistant on the new Moto Razr 60 Ultra replacing Gemini (as default). This week, the company also rolled out an AI voice assistant in the iOS app. Unlike Apple Intelligence, which only works on the iPhone 15 Pro and 15 Pro Max, and the iPhone 16 series, the new Perplexity AI assistant also works on older iPhones.
Yahoo
25-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Perplexity is building a browser in part to collect customer data for targeted ads
AI company Perplexity announced in February that it was building its own browser called Comet. In a recent interview with the TBPN podcast, CEO Aravind Srinivas gave some insight as to why the business appeared to be branching out from its artificial intelligence focus: It's to collect user data and sell them targeted advertisements. "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 all sounds familiar, it could be become Google's Chrome browser has taken a similar approach. In fact, Comet is built on Chromium, the open-source browser base from Google. That's not to say Perplexity wouldn't take the chance to go straight to the source and acquire Chrome in the aftermath of Google's recent monopoly court ruling regarding online search. 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. Unsurprisingly, he wasn't too keen on OpenAI acquiring the property.
Mint
25-04-2025
- Business
- Mint
'Want to understand what you're browsing': Aravind Srinivas reveals why Perplexity wants its own browser
Perplexity AI had announced earlier this year its plans to launch a new browser to compete directly with the likes of Google Chrome and Safari. In a recent interaction, the AI startup's CEO Aravind Srinivas has divulged that one of the reasons why Perplexity is to build a personalized profile of its users and potentially show some ads to them in the future. In an episode of the TBPN podcast, Srinivas said, "Instagram has shown some stats where the engagement time on the platform reduces if you remove the apps Because that's level personalization of the ants. So if any of the AI companies can do that I think that could be like a thing where brands could pay a lot more money To advertise there. So that's yet to be explored. But in order to crack that we need to crack memory properly that's kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to put a browser." 'We want to get data even outside the app to better understand you Because some of the prompts that people do in these as is purely work related it's not like that personal. On the other hand like what are things you're buying? Which hotels are going very which restaurants are you going to what are you spending time browsing? This is so much more about you that we plan to use all the context to build a better user profile And maybe you know through our discovery we could show some ads there.' Soon after a clip of his podcast gaining traction on social media and some media reports on the topic emerged, Srinivas issued a clarification on the matter, writing on X (Formerly Twitter), 'The podcast hosts asked me a hypothetical question about how ads could play out in AI products including Perplexity. I laid out a scenario. The core point was first cracking memory and personalization if you do want relevant ads.' 'Memory and personalization are problems that absolutely need to be worked on whether you do ads or not, for a fully functional AI assistant. And every user will be given the option to not be part of the personalization (with zero ads even) if they don't want it. It's up to them to make a trade off between utility and privacy.' First Published: 25 Apr 2025, 07:28 AM IST
