SAN FRANCISCO (AFP) – Perplexity AI chief Aravind Srinivas said on Wednesday that he hopes to collaborate with news publishers which accuse the Google challenger of freeloading off their work.
Srinivas took part in an on-stage interview at a Wall Street Journal tech conference in California just days after the news outlet and the New York Post filed a lawsuit arguing that Perplexity is guilty of massive copyright infringement and trademark violations.
“We certainly were very surprised about the lawsuit, because we actually wanted a conversation,” Srinivas said. “I’m here to make it very clear that I would love to have a commercial contract.” Srinivas criticised Google’s model of directing traffic to websites, raking in money along the way from ads or sponsored results.
He laid out a vision of Perplexity artificial intelligence (AI) insightfully answering online queries, then sharing ad revenue with sources cited by the search engine in process.
“We’re going to do advertising on Perplexity,” Srinivas said.
“Whenever we make advertising revenue, we’re going to share that revenue with the content publishers in a manner inspired by Spotify.”
Perplexity.ai is a question-answering platform known for its minimalist and conversational interface.
Unlike ChatGPT or Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity’s tool provides up-to-date answers that often include links to source materials, allowing users to verify information.
