Perplexity is probably stealing content

For Wired, Dhruv Mehrotra and Tim Marchman provide evidence that Perplexity, an AI-based company currently valued at a billion dollars, appears to be slurping up whatever they can get their hands on:

It also appears probable that in some cases—and despite a graphical representation in its user interface that shows the chatbot “reading” specific source material before giving a reply to a prompt—Perplexity is summarizing not actual news articles but reconstructions of what they say based on URLs and traces of them left in search engines like extracts and metadata, offering summaries purporting to be based on direct access to the relevant text.

The magic trick that’s made Perplexity worth 10 figures, in other words, appears to be that it’s both doing what it says it isn’t and not doing what it says it is.