The new AI company Perplexity has announced last February that it was building its own browser called Comet. In a recent interview with the TBPN podcast, CEO Aravind Srinivas gave some insight as to why the business appeared to be branching out from its artificial intelligence focus: It's to collect user data and sell them targeted advertisements.
"That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you," he said.
"Once you understand the user deeply enough, the user can probably trust you if you show them relevant sponsored content, as long as it's super personalized and hyper-optimized to that user," Srinivas said. "If any of the AI companies could do that, I think that could be a thing where brands could pay a lot more money to advertise there."
"We wanna get data, even outside the app to better understand you," Srinivas schemed, referring to tracking non-user data, as companies like Facebook and Google have been caught doing (and definitely still are, by the way.) "What are the things you’re buying, which hotels are you going [to], which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing, tells us so much more about you."
If that all sounds familiar, it could be become Google's Chrome browser has taken a similar approach. In fact, Comet is built on Chromium, the open-source browser base from Google. That's not to say Perplexity wouldn't take the chance to go straight to the source and acquire Chrome in the aftermath of Google's recent monopoly court ruling regarding online search.
The company emphatically notes that it does not "sell" or "share" personal information "as those terms are defined under the California Consumer Privacy Act" — an oddly specific caveat. "Nor have we done so in the preceding 12 months." (It would be difficult to imagine how Comet is supposed to turn a profit on hyper-personal ad surveillance unless this line gets an update.)
In the ongoing hearings about Google and its potential sale of Chrome, Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said he thought Perplexity would be able to continue running the browser at its current scale. Unsurprisingly, he wasn't too keen on OpenAI acquiring the property.
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