In February, Perplexity, an artificial intelligence company, announced that it was creating its own browser called Comet. In a recent interview with the TBPN podcast, CEO Aravind Srinivas explained why the company has moved away from its core AI specialization: it collects data about users and sells them targeted ads.
“That’s another reason why we wanted to create a browser, because we want to get data even outside the app to understand you better,” he said. “We plan to use all the context to create a better user profile and maybe you know that through our search feed we could show ads there.”
If this all sounds familiar, Google’s Chrome browser may have taken a similar approach. In fact, Comet is built on Chromium, Google’s open-source browser framework. This is not to say that Perplexity would not jump at the chance to go to the source and acquire Chrome after the recent court ruling on Google’s monopoly on Internet search. During the ongoing hearings regarding Google and the potential sale of Chrome, the company’s CEO Dmitry Shevelenko said that he believes Perplexity will be able to continue working on the browser at its current scale. Unsurprisingly, he wasn’t too interested in acquiring the OpenAI property.
