Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has said that the company’s in-house developed browser, Comet, is on track for a May launch.
In a recent interview with CNBC, Srinivas said that he envisions multi-step research and longer browsing sessions by autonomous AI agents to be a core part of Comet. He revealed that the Comet browser will be built on top of Chromium, an open-source project introduced and maintained by Perplexity rival Google.
It also serves as the foundation for other browsers, including Microsoft Edge, Brave, and Opera. Google also uses the same Chromium codebase with additional proprietary components to make its flagship Chrome browser.
“You cannot just take away Chrome without Chromium. Someone has to maintain it, open-source it,” Srinivas said while explaining Perplexity’s decision to not recommend that Google divest Chrome as part of remedies in a landmark US antitrust case.
The Indian-origin tech entrepreneur further said that he does not believe OpenAI should buy Chrome from Google, if the search giant were forced to sell it, since the ChatGPT-maker has “historically, reputation-wise not been pro open-source.”
At least Google has established a track record of maintaining the open-source project even if their number one competitor, Microsoft, is building a competitive product to them. I don’t think you can say that about OpenAI,” Srinivas said.
He added that it was not in the US’ interest to break up Google, which is considered to be one of the top stocks in the tech sector.
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However, Srinivas said that he does not support Google’s agreements with smartphone manufacturers on the Android side. “We have an Android app and an Android assistant that can control the operating system natively. And they [Google] are not letting us get in with OEMs [original equipment manufacturers] even if the OEMs want it,” he said.
Recently, Perplexity announced that it has signed a partnership with Motorola for its app to be pre-installed on the Razr series. The app can also be accessed through Moto AI by typing ‘Ask Perplexity’. The AI search startup is also reportedly in talks with Samsung for a similar deal.
But Gemini is likely to still be the default AI assistant on Android-operated smartphones, as opposed to Perplexity’s AI assistant. “Nobody wanted to take the brave step of removing Gemini as the default AI assistant and making Perplexity the default because if they do that, they are unable to offer Google Play Store, Google Maps, YouTube, pre-loaded on these phones,” Srinivas said.
He also said that Perplexity would like to be part of Apple Intelligence if they were to open it up to AI assistants other than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
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What else do we know about Comet?
In another appearance on the TBPN podcast, Srinivas suggested that Perplexity could potentially track user behaviour outside of its Comet browser to sell users premium ads based on their likings.
“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. Because some of the prompts that people do in these AIs is purely work-related. It’s not like that’s personal,” Srinivas said.
“On the other hand, 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. We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there,” he said.
To be sure, tech giants such as Google, Meta, and even Apple gather vast amounts of user data via tracking tools to sell ads within their products.
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However, Srinivas has since clarified that the discussion was purely hypothetical and not indicative of an official roadmap. “Memory and personalisation are problems that absolutely need to be worked on whether you do ads or not, for a fully functional AI assistant,” he wrote in a post on X.
“And every user will be given the option to not be part of the personalization (with zero ads even) if they don’t want it. It’s up to them to make a trade off between utility and privacy,” he added.
He said that hypothetically, Perplexity users could have three options while using Comet: no memory, no ads; memory without ads; and memory with ads that appear in the Discover feed. However, it is likely that Comet will initially be ad-free with memory capabilities due to the Perplexity team reportedly having “zero bandwidth” to currently build out the tech required for the third option.
“Our recognition has always been providing it fastest and more accurate. We also pride oursleves in the fact that we do it in the most efficient way,” Srinivas told CNBC, adding that it is offering the cheapest API pricing compared to OpenAI and Google due to its efficient infrastructure.