Sometimes the news doesn’t fit neatly into one story, or breaks after the weekly column is out Thursday afternoon. Doesn’t happen often, but while we slept, more AI/XR news broke. Here’s a link to part one of this week’s roundup.
AI Search Provider Perplexity Raises $76.3 M. The round was led by venture capital firm IVP values the venture at $520 million. NEA, NVIDIA, Databricks, and Bessemer Venture Partners also participated in the round. Perplexity’s search tools enable users to get instant answers to questions with sources and citations. Perplexity raised $25.6 M in March and says it has served more than 500 M searches last year.
ChatGPT Store Opens Next Week After jumping through a few hoops, anyone can now train chatGPT for specialized tasks and sell these AI apps in OpenAI’s GPT store.
Google to Offer Paid Subscriptions to Bard. Bard, helps us do something we are already doing – search – much better and faster. And the implementation on the Google Labs search page, is at the expense of their ad business. You don’t see that very often. As Bard improves, and newer, more powerful models are made available, The Verge reports on rumors Google wants to charge for a souped up version of Bard to compete with ChatGPT, which made $1.6 B dollars in 2023.
Practical Magic: VR and AR Are the Next Big Thing… Again CNet editor Scott Stein, a longtime follower, and advocate, for the technology says it’s finally good enough for prime time. One the eve of CES, he says “In 2024, what was once called the metaverse will now be searching for function. Bigger players like Apple, Samsung and Google could make that happen faster.”
