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Isn't perplexity rather a "wrapper" company? Wouldn't acquiring a UX focused company bring enormous difficulties in integration, to retain Apples look and feel?

Isn't perplexity rather a "wrapper" company? Wouldn't acquiring a UX focused company bring enormous difficulties in integration, to retain Apples look and feel? What seems to be missing for Apple is access to competitive foundation models. Perplexity has published a few finetuned models (https://openrouter.ai/provider/perplexity https://openrouter.ai/provider/perplexity), but their focus does not seem to be own creating their own foundation models. Furthermore, the entire angle on multimodality is also lacking, which is needed for true AI assistants.

halJordan 1y ago
No its not a wrapper. It's a search engine. HN audience again shows how far behind the curve they are when it comes to actual new technology.
- cpldcpu 1y ago
  I thought the snark was rather the hallmark, but i'll take it... But, yes, they are a search engine. However it seems that all the other frontier LLM companies easily copied this as a feature, so one has to wonder which part is really differentiating.
bionhoward 1y ago
Wrapper companies are winning these days because using the AI services directly is literally dumb, due to poor privacy and explicitly anticompetitive legal terms. Using wrappers lets you isolate yourself from the noncompetes, ensure no model training on your content, and enjoy a significantly better user experience. Maybe one day OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic will wake up to the fact their lame privacy takes (e.g. - OpenAI hiding the opt out of model training for even when other people use your custom GPTs - Gemini’s implicit human review of every conversation, Gemini breaking chat history when you opt out of brain rape, - Anthropic’s impossible-to-logically-satisfy customer noncompete giving them an excuse to read everyone’s chats to verify they aren’t competing ) and customer noncompetes are retarded, but until that happens, wrappers are crushing them and riding a tremendous wave of innovation without needing to waste money on the most expensive part which is training
- patrickhogan1 1y ago
  Wrappers absolutely have value. The same as software on the OS has value. The same as workflow SaaS has value. I do not follow your point on privacy. AFAIK all tokens that perplexity sends to the foundation model APIs are stored by those companies. For example OpenAI is under court order to store everything. Is your point that because perplexity can trim off the metadata of who their customer is, the body of the content is harder to identify?
woleium 1y ago
I assume they have agreeable contracts with LLM vendors it may be difficult for Apple to obtain by other means.

halJordan 1y ago

No its not a wrapper. It's a search engine. HN audience again shows how far behind the curve they are when it comes to actual new technology.

cpldcpu 1y ago
I thought the snark was rather the hallmark, but i'll take it... But, yes, they are a search engine. However it seems that all the other frontier LLM companies easily copied this as a feature, so one has to wonder which part is really differentiating.

bionhoward 1y ago

Wrapper companies are winning these days because using the AI services directly is literally dumb, due to poor privacy and explicitly anticompetitive legal terms. Using wrappers lets you isolate yourself from the noncompetes, ensure no model training on your content, and enjoy a significantly better user experience. Maybe one day OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic will wake up to the fact their lame privacy takes (e.g. - OpenAI hiding the opt out of model training for even when other people use your custom GPTs - Gemini’s implicit human review of every conversation, Gemini breaking chat history when you opt out of brain rape, - Anthropic’s impossible-to-logically-satisfy customer noncompete giving them an excuse to read everyone’s chats to verify they aren’t competing ) and customer noncompetes are retarded, but until that happens, wrappers are crushing them and riding a tremendous wave of innovation without needing to waste money on the most expensive part which is training

patrickhogan1 1y ago
Wrappers absolutely have value. The same as software on the OS has value. The same as workflow SaaS has value. I do not follow your point on privacy. AFAIK all tokens that perplexity sends to the foundation model APIs are stored by those companies. For example OpenAI is under court order to store everything. Is your point that because perplexity can trim off the metadata of who their customer is, the body of the content is harder to identify?

woleium 1y ago

I assume they have agreeable contracts with LLM vendors it may be difficult for Apple to obtain by other means.