The generative AI space appearing on CNBC this morning,
CEOs of Perplexity, that newly minted Unicorn startup and Anthropic,
which makes the AI chat bot Claude,
our Deirdre Bosa was watching that has some details on
today's tech.
Check what you think, Dean.
Hey, good morning, Carl. Well,
those two CEOs, they work in different categories of Gen.
AI startups. There's Anthropic building the foundational models.
And then there's Perplexity, which builds on top of many
different models,
the application layer. But what they have in common,
they are both Google alums.
Challenging the incumbent, Anthropic has backing from Google,
Google as well as Amazon,
but it's clogged. 3 LLM also competes with Google's Gemini.
And Perplexity is doing what Google is unwilling to do.
A new user interface that totally embraces Gen.
AI and a new type of query that could replace
search and more importantly,
search ads. Here is CEO Arvind Srinivas on Squawk Box
today.
The incumbent is always our biggest competition,
Google, because we are entering the search category,
except the difference has been unlike previous competitors to Google
that try to take market share in the 10 blue
link search engine market share.
Instead we're trying to create a new category called the
answer engine where you just get a direct answer to
any question you ask and it disrupts the whole thin
blue link user interface.
Disrupting the whole user interface.
That is something that Google has been slow to do,
and with good reason. That could mean disrupting its whole
business model.
Search ads, but Anthropic and Perplexity are examples of upstart
genii native companies with less to lose that are keeping
the incumbents on their toes.
When I spoke to Srinivasa a few months ago,
he told me how his time at Google inspired him
to start his own company because there were so many
researchers turned entrepreneurs there.
And he's not alone. Call it the PayPal mafia for
the Gen.
AI Age, a group of former Google execs that have
gone on to build the Gen.
AI darlings. There's Anthropic Open AI,
Mistral Character dot, AI Inflection,
that's just to name a few.
All of those were founded by or led by former
Google employees.
So it's not surprising that anxiety is rising within Google
itself.
Our generalized broke details on a leaked meeting from Google
search chief Prabhakar Raghavan.
He told employees that. If there's a clear and present
market reality,
we need to twitch faster like the athletes twitch faster.
The irony perhaps though, and all of this guys,
is that it is formal Googlers implying pressure.
I could go on and on the list of how
many execs have gone on to found AI companies and
a lot of them say they wanted to ship the
stuff needs to be tested in the real world to
gain any traction and to be perfected.