Perplexity CEO Says Tech Giants 'Copy Anything That's Good' (businessinsider.com) 29
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas warned young entrepreneurs that tech giants will "copy anything that's good" during a talk at Y Combinator's AI Startup School, telling founders they must "live with that fear." Srinivas said that companies raising tens of billions need to justify capital expenditures and search for new revenue streams.
Perplexity pioneered web-crawling chatbots when it launched its answer engine in December 2022, but Google's Bard added internet-crawling three months later, followed by ChatGPT in May 2023 and Anthropic's Claude in March 2025. The competition has extended to browsers, with Perplexity launching its Comet browser on July 9 and Reuters reporting that OpenAI is developing a web browser to challenge Google Chrome. Perplexity's communications head Jesse Dwyer said larger companies will "drown your voice."
Perplexity pioneered web-crawling chatbots when it launched its answer engine in December 2022, but Google's Bard added internet-crawling three months later, followed by ChatGPT in May 2023 and Anthropic's Claude in March 2025. The competition has extended to browsers, with Perplexity launching its Comet browser on July 9 and Reuters reporting that OpenAI is developing a web browser to challenge Google Chrome. Perplexity's communications head Jesse Dwyer said larger companies will "drown your voice."
Obviously (Score:3, Interesting)
No honor among thieves. And these enterprises are just thieves that found out how to evade the law.
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And how anybody can be so abysmally stupid as to mod this down will forever remain a mystery to me. I hope you fuckup at least got paid for that.
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And, come on assholes! Waste some more precious mod-points on me! I dare you!
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Meh, mod points are not precious I get them every other day.
You must be doing something wrong.
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No idea. But here I am just baiting.
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They'll copy anything that's good (Score:5, Interesting)
and make it worse, until it's enshittified to uselessness.
Re:They'll copy anything that's good (Score:4, Interesting)
But first they use their market power to crush the original innovator by subsidizing competition to extinguish the competition, or simply buy it up.
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Where Did Perplexity Get The Idea? (Score:2)
Where did Perplexity get the idea to crawl the web? It seems to me that Google had been doing for 24 years before Perplexity decided to do it and AltaVista was doing it before Google.
The guy's not wrong, but he's also just as guilty.
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I don’t see where Perplexity was an internet giant when Google decided to copy them.
There’s derived ideas, and theres copying. Perplexity was deriving from Google, google just straight out copied Perplexity’s implementation.
It’s like:
You invent an Apple, and also sell Apple Juice, based on your apples.
Your neighbor tastes your Apple Juice, and thinks they can do better, and invents Apple Cider.Some people like Apple Cider, some prefer Juice, both of you get sales.
Then, Kroger sees yo
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Set down the crack pipe, you've had enough.
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Did your neighbor
)&^$o d$%& NO CARRIER
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I don’t see where Perplexity was an internet giant when Google decided to copy them.
There’s derived ideas, and theres copying. Perplexity was deriving from Google, google just straight out copied Perplexity’s implementation.
Google obviously didn't copy Perplexity's implementation. They read news about what Perplexity was doing and then just created their own implementation. The core idea is so straightforward that anyone skilled in the art would be able to develop their own implementation quickly. That's also why Perplexity didn't apply for a patent, because these types of ideas are not patentable.
What does this mean for the fate of startups and small companies? Well, it means that their survival is often dependent on the
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They do not crawl the web. They don't have an own index and their own model (they have in addition to using APIs for OpenAI, Anthropic, etc.) is a fine-tuned version of a Chinese one. They only do targeted requests for user searches, but don't run an own web crawler.
So wait (Score:2)
It should all be "good" then, right?
What happened?
Uhhh (Score:2)
That's not what they mean, Perplexity. (Score:2)
When tech giants "copy anything that's good", it means imitate/integrate with your own product, they don't mean literal copyright infringement
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Bill Gates [edge-op.org] Feb 1999: “I am reading about the Gateway adoption of the Corel software. I am interested to understand what this means better and how it relates to any contracts we have with them.”
Eric Rudder Dec 1998 [edge-op.org]: “Star offers desktop suite for free”
Bill Gates: “At some point we will have to consider the patents they violat
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https://www.bakerlaw.com/servi... [bakerlaw.com]
In related news ... (Score:2)
Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk both recently remarked that, "Tech Giants Copy Anything That's Good".
Can we edit this whole thing? (Score:2)
"Tech giants will copy anything."
I really don't think you need any qualifiers on that. Good, bad, mediocre, who cares? They'll copy it and see if they can sell it. If they can't, they'll dump it, but they'll sure as fuck copy it if they see it exists and even for a microsecond think they can monetize it. Maybe even if they don't think they can monetize it, but think someone else may try to monetize it. They want everything. All of it. Data, ideas, concepts, rough outlines, shitposts, they want it ALL. And f
Whew! (Score:2)
Microsoft is safe.
But seriously, back during the last centuries dot com boom, anyone making a pitch to VCs would have to explain in their business plan what they planned to do should Microsoft take a shine to their technology and abscond with it.
an 'everything company' (Score:2)
This quote describes the danger here. The tech giants are already so wealthy and so powerful. They are capable of replicating almost any innovation and possibly doing it better.
"Browser wars should be won by users, and if users lose Browser War III, it will be from a familiar playbook: monopolistic behavior by an 'everything company' forcing its product on the market," Dwyer wrote. "In this sense, whatever OpenAI builds as a browser will be no different than Google's."
It's just a matter of perspective (Score:3)
If you're a startup, your idea looks like a great business.
If you're a tech giant, the very same idea just looks like a new feature to bolt onto your existing product or service.
It's hard to keep a business profitable when you're selling something that another business thinks of as a loss-leader.
My first job out of college ended after Microsoft added our flagship product's feature set to Windows. I still have mixed feelings about it.