Perplexity CEO speaks to WSJ after News Corp lawsuit

On Monday, News Corp. filed a lawsuit against artificial intelligence company Perplexity, arguing that the artificial intelligence company violated its copyrights by taking its work and repackaging it for its users.

On Wednesday, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas appeared at a News Corp. conference, where he attempted to address “the elephant in the room” early in his conversation.

Srinivas was interviewed at the WSJ Tech conference, hosted by News Corp.’s flagship publication. is aligned The Wall Street Journal. “They are not the only publishers concerned about the AI ​​products that are making their content appear in their responses,” Srinivas said magazine.

“I would say they contacted us around June to talk to us and we responded to them and said we were also open to discussions with them and interested in having a proper commercial discussion about how the content should be used on the Internet.” Wall Street Journal and other similar outlets owned by them. “So of course we were very surprised by the lawsuit because we actually wanted to have a conversation,” he added.

Srinivas compared his company to Spotify, the music streaming service that helped transform music’s business model, which had struggled with declining revenue and label influence until the streaming boom brought it back from the brink into an era of brought growth.

“I would like to make it very clear that I would like to have a commercial contract. And whatever Wall Street Journal We alone have a select publisher program that we announced months ago where we clearly stated that we were going to advertise on Perplexity, and whenever we generate advertising revenue, we will share that revenue with the content publishers in an inspired way share Spotify, where creators will continue to be paid as long as Spotify continues to grow,” he said, adding, “I hope we can figure something out here.”

Perplexity is pitching itself as a new competitor to Google, helping users ask questions to get answers. But while Google (at least originally) served users by providing them with links to other websites, Perplexity consumes a large amount of content and condenses it to provide an answer. It contains quotes, but many of the publishers are concerned that it does not require the user to access the source material.

In the case of News Corp. The media giant argued that in some cases, Perplexity not only used some paragraphs verbatim, but also hallucinated some things, and then quoted its media.

“We try our best to retrain these models to make sure that it’s not like we’re reproducing content, but we’re just trying to leverage multiple different sources and provide a diverse perspective,” Srinivas said. “AIs are not perfect, we are still working with technology that is constantly improving.

“All the problems that exist today are new problems that did not exist a year or two ago. “Similarly, hallucinations are another issue that the media is not happy about being quoted in a response that may be inaccurate, which makes sense,” he added. “We do our best to be the most accurate chatbot on the market by trying to constantly base our answers on sources, and every single day everyone in the company is constantly tracking and constantly thinking about any inaccurate answers can fix.” . That’s why we do our best to ensure the product continually improves.”

For now, Perplexity is still raising cash and is targeting a valuation of about $9 billion in its latest round. Srinivas said at the conference that he hopes the company will be profitable in three to five years, although the uncertain legal landscape surrounding generative AI will certainly play a role in that prospect.