John Gruber blogging about the Perplexity stunt to buy Chrome:

I think what’s happening is that the LLM chatbot field is maturing (exemplified by OpenAI’s launch of ChatGPT 5 last week), and Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is getting increasingly desperate.

Unless Apple does somehow acquire Perplexity, I doubt Perplexity is going to succeed in the long run. Some people think the AI bubble will pop, bringing down all of these companies. But OpenAI and Anthropic are here to stay. The thing about bubbles… Webvan didn’t make it out of the dot-com bubble, but we all order groceries online now.

@manton to be fair, John makes some good points about Chrome being pointless without Google integration. I hadn’t thought of it like that before.

@manton Proudly not “we all”.

@kev I’m also skeptical that Chrome would be popular if someone else owned it. But I don’t personally use it, and I feel a little disconnected from the whole Google suite.

@patrickrhone I should’ve said “many of us”… 🙂

@patrickrhone love this!

(Also, I can’t tell you how many young people I know that will willingly pay $30 for a taco bell burrito or some other bullshit just so they don’t have to get it themselves, even if they are driving right by one. Wish I could convince them to at min save that delivery fee)

@manton I think OpenAI and Anthropic are in real trouble actually. They don't really have the cash to do this. The LLM companies that have the cash to make it out? Google. Meta. Maybe xAI.

@patrickrhone you are absolutely on an island with this :)

@patrickrhone I’m with you on a lot of that. I like going to a restaurant. I love shopping for books in person. But for whatever reason, I do not enjoy grocery stores.

@manton Bubbles bursting is often a good thing. Certainly, the dotcom bust birthed both sustainable e-commerce and the Web 2.0 era.

@rscottjones @patrickrhone Yes, food delivery via DoorDash or Uber Eats is definitely out of control.

@patrickrhone Understandable. Sometimes, the service is hilariously bad. I was home solo the weekend before Thanksgiving several years ago, and I had a free grocery delivery for some reason, so I ordered a few things, including a 12-14 lb frozen turkey so it could start to thaw for Thanksgiving. What I received, was a 1 lb package of sliced deli turkey. 🤔. One of many errors with the order and the last time I used such a service.

@jasonekratz No. But that's why they're the ones that can stay in. I think it's going to be very hard to be an LLM "business" when the margins are so bad and the open weight models are free and right behind the commercial ones in performance.

So basically what survives are the ones where the development is being propped up by some other part of the business. Or an eccentric billionaire.

@colincornaby I don’t know much about Anthropic’s business, but ChatGPT has so many users, I think they are in a good position. They have a surprising amount of revenue already considering how much they give away.

@manton Right, but revenue doesn't mean anything when they're racking up negative profits.

@jasonekratz That sounds right. There’s less to differentiate Perplexity. If their browser doesn’t resonate with people (Dia has more mindshare) then they’ll need something new.

@kaa I’m happy here. Plenty of coconuts to talk to.

@patrickrhone :)

@manton same. I’ve used Firefox for as long as I can remember. They’ve made some questionable choices over the years, but it’s muscle memory at this point. Anything else just feels alien.

@patrickrhone I feel the same way but think I am now in the minority.

@de Well, we now have a minority of at least two.