AI platform Perplexity to in talks to double valuation to US$8 billion

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Artificial-intelligence search company Perplexity, which is backed by Jeff Bezos, has reportedly begun fundraising talks where it looks to move than double its valuation to US$8 billion or more.

Perplexity reportedly said that it is looking to raise around US$500 million in its new round of funding, according to the Wall Street Journal who were citing people familiar with the matter.

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This comes just days after it was reported that The New York Times was issuing a cease-and-desist letter to Perplexity to get it to stop using content from its site, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The New York Times currently does not allow the use of its content for AI model training as well as AI crawlers which tells search engine crawlers which URLS they can index.

Perplexity has said in the past that it respects robots.txt.

Perplexity will not crawl full or partial text content of a news publisher that has disallowed PerplexityBot via robots.txt, it said. Some news web pages may still be indexed even if a page is blocked via robots.txt. In this instance, only the website domain, headline, and a factual summary of the page are added to our search index.

Previously, Perplexity had a feature where a user could prompt a specific URL within the answer engine to summarise it. It was a very infrequent application but was designed to give users a way to summarise a large volume of text without using our file upload feature, it added in a FAQ page.

"When a user prompted a specific URL, the user deployed our AI agent to scrape the URL on the user’s behalf, even if that web page had a robots.txt file in place. It was effectively the same as if the user went to a page themselves, copied the text of the article, and then pasted it into the system," it explained.

"The process had to be initiated by a user, URL by URL. We found that some users were abusing this feature in ways that violate our terms of service, so we have temporarily disabled this feature to not scrape a URL if it’s not in our search index, even if a user prompts the URL," it added.

Separately, while PerplexityBot respects robots.txt, third-party web crawlers — which it uses to help build its search index — were not always following robots.txt files.

"We have since made adjustments with our providers to ensure that they follow robots.txt when crawling on Perplexity’s behalf and never access full text content from disallowed news publisher sites," it said.

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