Perplexity’s CEO Sees AI Agents as the Next Web Battleground

Wait though … Perplexity—like other AI search engines—has been criticized for hallucinating and getting things wrong.

We welcome this criticism, because it’s the best way for us to continually improve. In reality, errors account for a small fraction of results, and our answers are far more accurate than 10 blue links polluted by decades of SEO-optimized content. [In response to a follow-up request, Perplexity did not provide further details on error rates, but Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman, said that reliability is improving constantly]. But the fact is, accuracy and trust will only become more important as AI integrates into more of our lives, so this is something we’re relentlessly focused on. We can’t get there without this feedback.

Perplexity also cribs from copyrighted news articles with its “discover” section. Do you understand why some publishers are upset?

We’ve answered that before. See our blog post on how we respect robots.txt [a file added to websites that specifies whether web crawlers should access their content].

The Perplexity assistant for Android and iOS seems “agentic” because it can take actions. How big of a shift is this?

AI is pretty good at answering questions now. What really needs to be done is get AI to take actions. People use the word “agents”; you can go with whatever you want—“agent” or “assistant”—but in the end, it needs to string together tools and execute actions. That’s why we’re [also building a] browser, and an assistant on iOS, Android.

Do Apple and Google have too much control over their mobile platforms compared to outsiders looking to build agents?

With iOS it’s particularly challenging, because you have to string together a bunch of event APIs. On iOS, Mail, Calendar, Reminders, Podcasts, all that stuff is natively available through the Apple SDK [software development kit used to build applications], so you can actually at least draft emails, schedule meetings, move meetings, set reminders, all this stuff, open podcasts pretty easily. You can do searches for podcasts … “get me the one where Mark Andreessen discusses de-banking with Joe Rogan.” It can get you that pretty quickly.

It’s mostly difficult because you cannot access other apps. iOS is not very different from Android, because AI cannot access most apps on Android either (meaning that the Perplexity assistant can interact with some apps more easily than others). [But] third-party apps can build their SDKs to be accessible on the Android SDK. For example, our Android system can display a song on Spotify. On iOS, you can only link to a specific Spotify song, and you have to manually start playing the audio.

Oh, so it’s app-makers that are holding AI agents back?

That’s the challenge. If people are offering us APIs—say, Open Table, Uber, DoorDash, or Instacart—where we can access information within the app without even having to open the app. On the back end, that’s pretty powerful. For example, if we can access information on Uber and find that Uber comfort doesn’t cost more than 5 or 10 percent of Uber X, then we can just book Uber comfort for you—if that’s a preference that you set on Perplexity.