AI companies are looking to expand their sphere of influence beyond the immediate AI products they’ve built.
One such company is Perplexity AI, and its CEO, Aravind Srinivas, recently shed light on an ambitious project: the Comet browser. In an interview on the TBPN podcast, Srinivas outlined Perplexity’s plans to use the browser to gather user data and leverage it for personalized advertising, potentially transforming the way brands engage with their target audience. His explanation offers a glimpse into the future of AI-driven advertising and the lengths to which companies are willing to go to understand user interests.
“Instagram has shown some statistics where the engagement time on their platform reduces if they remove the ads because that’s the level of personalization at hand,” Srinivas stated. “So if any of the AI companies can do that, I think that could be a thing where brands could be a lot more money to advertise there.” This acknowledges the effectiveness, and perhaps even the necessity, of personalized ads in maintaining user engagement. Srinivas continues, suggesting that this avenue is ripe for exploration: “So that’s yet to be explored, but in order to crack that, you need to correct memory properly.” .
He further elaborated on Perplexity’s strategy: “That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser. We want to get data even outside the app to better understand you because some of the problems that people do in these [apps] are purely work-related. It’s not that personal. On the other hand, what are things you’re buying, which hotels are you going to, which restaurants are you going to, what are you spending time browsing? [This] tells us so much more about you.”
This comprehensive data collection, according to Srinivas, will be used to create more detailed user profiles: “That we plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and maybe, you know, through our Discovery tab, we could show some ads there.” Finally, addressing the launch timeline for Comet, he admitted to some delays: “We’re supposed to be out by now. We got delayed I think partly because we underestimated the difficulty of the project and partly because we tried to do multiple things. So, we’ve tried to scope it down. We’re aiming to get it out by mid-May.”
Perplexity isn’t the only AI company that’s looking to create a browser. OpenAI has indicated interest in acquiring Google’s Chrome browser. Perplexity too has previously talked about integrating advertising in its product — it has experimented with sponsored ads in its “related” questions after a query, and Srinivas had said that ads in LLMs could be directed towards AI agents instead of users. But it appears that both OpenAI and Perplexity now want to go direct, and acquire a whole browser. A browser, of course, would provide unprecedented information about users, which these companies can then use to show relevant ads to them. But this does show that while AI companies have built intelligent products that threaten to upend all of humanity, they still don’t have great ideas on how to monetize their services than to show ads to users.