[SirensOfTitan]

The generic elevator music used for the demo video is highly representative of this whole concept: generic and derivative.

Seriously though, Perplexity, like most of the AI wrapper companies, seems unable to innovate much beyond the query-response chat paradigm. I don't understand why VCs continue to fund these ai-slop companies. I see a new company's advertisements on the NY subway every week, and they're all the same: Anthropic/Google/OpenAI resellers who are selling some UI wrapper (or at best a bespoke model worse than the flagships) on top of pretty basic prompt engineering or tools.

This is what happens when we invert the product-paradigm: we're not solving problems with technology, we're taking technology and applying it to problems.

I use AI every day, so I'm hardly a luddite, but this bubble is so ridiculous at this point. This perplexity product, more than any other so far, feels so representative of peak craze.

[ryandrake]

I'd be willing to bet that every wannabe CEO out there is spooging after seeing that demo. That's clearly the target market: The wantrepreneurs who would surely have their brilliant successful business if only they didn't have to hire a bunch of lazy employees to half-ass it! "If only I could just speak my vague ideas to my computer, and it could do all the hard work of building and running this business, I could just chill out, be an entrepreneur on Insta, and collect the revenue checks.

[mygooch]

The rich kids used to want to be rockstars, now they all want to be entrepreneurs.

Back when work was work and we had festivals.

[mygooch]

It's what grads do after school - create an AI startup.

If you went to the right school, you can be a Series A company with nothing more than an OPENAI_API_KEY. Most of the young and inexperienced founders mentally retire at this point and start their family planning.

There were a few cities like "Austin", but now I guess it's just SF and NY again (I'm in SF).

The students get what they paid for.

The school gets their metrics.

The VCs get returns, from the increased revenue their portfolios just paid for by investing in their kid's startup.

And the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin!