At VB Transform: Perplexity CBO on factfulness, plagiarism and how AI (and Perplexity) are aiming to rewrite the unwritten rules

Factfulness is not a real word, but it’s a really great one. It’s also the promise of Perplexity and its very buzzy “answer engine.” “Factfulness and accuracy is what we care about,” Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told The Verge back in March, and isn’t that all we ever wanted in an AI search engine? It’s got big name big fans like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, who reportedly uses it almost every day, and Tobi Lütke, Shopify CEO, who has kicked Google to the curb in favor of Perplexity. Tech CEOs seem excited. Some even say Perplexity is giving Google a run for its money — and Perplexity Chief Business officer Dmitry Shevelenkobe will be dishing about that during the third day of VB Transform 2024.

Publishers, however, really, really aren’t as crazy about the search engine, even calling it “a rent-seeking middleman on high-quality sources.” Answers bring the results to the user, rather than directing the user to the source, and that means they get all the ad revenue while the source, with all the information, gets none. Counterpoint, says Shevelenko: the company is developing a revenue-sharing strategy we’ll see any moment now. And its recently released Pages feature creates a whole entire report for users based on content it scrapes — but let’s just say that if a kid turned in that report as their homework, they’d get nailed for plagiarism. A developer, on the other hand, might get nailed for ignoring robots.txt (and in fact AWS is investigating the issue).

Maybe the question is whether the unwritten robots.txt rule (thou shall obey the request to not scrape a site) is ready to be rewritten in the Age of AI?

So what’s the real story? Dmitry Shevelenko is in one of the best positions to spill. That’s why you don’t want to miss his talk at VB Transform 2024, with an opportunity to pose questions, where he’ll be tackling the ways Perplexity is shaping how AI evolves, large language models and their practical applications — plus why the future of AI requires new thinking around data utilization, organizational efficiency and new capabilities — and more.

The conference is almost here! It’s happening live in San Francisco, July 9, 10 and 11, and it’s all about putting AI to work at scale, with a focus on the practical gen AI case studies and application stories that matter most, directly from the industry leaders with the know-how, the been there, done that, and the ever-present enthusiasm about the AI revolution. Register now!