Amazon Wins Suit Against Perplexity, Blocking AI Shopping Agent

(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Perp walk

Perplexity has been left behind in the AI wars

Once touted as a potential Google killer, the AI search engine’s traffic has been flat over the last year, while peers like Claude have surged ahead.

David Crowther, Claire Yubin Oh

Last summer, Perplexity was hot stuff. The CEO of the AI-powered research tool was on the front cover of Fortune magazine, the company itself was about to make a long-shot $34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome from Alphabet, and executives at Apple were warning that traditional internet search was starting to feel the pain as users switched to services like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

But a year later, Perplexity’s progress has stalled out.

Per data from Similarweb, US website traffic to perplexity.ai has been broadly flat, adding fewer than 4 million visitors from February 2025 to February 2026, while rival Claude more than quadrupled its web users.

How did perplexity get left behind in the AI wars — Sherwood News

Naturally, Perplexity lags even further behind the true giants of the GenAI game, ChatGPT and Gemini, which racked up 1 billion and 276 million US monthly website visits, respectively, in February.

Confused, baffled, bewildered

From the start, Perplexity was structured somewhat differently to ChatGPT and others. Its primary function was to answer questions as precisely as possible, with its powerful citation framework making it a research tool for many. It isn’t a frontier model maker, instead relying on some of the very LLMs that it competes against for users.

But as models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have progressed, what made Perplexity special has become table stakes. Each is now pretty adept at complex, research-based tasks, with Google incorporating Gemini’s real-time AI overviews and ChatGPT adding answers with citations. Anthropic’s success in the enterprise market, targeting professional use cases with Claude, has even shifted the entire industry toward agentic AI — tools that can execute on tasks.

It’s almost hard not to feel sorry for Perplexity, considering the company’s three biggest competitors are: the most well-funded startup in history, Google, and the second-most well-funded startup in history. Throw in a number of bitter lawsuits and legal tensions, including from major news publishers and forums like Reddit, and Perplexity’s offering has become increasingly difficult to execute on and increasingly available elsewhere. Just yesterday, in fact, a federal judge temporarily blocked Perplexity from accessing and scraping Amazon with its Comet browser — another obstacle to its foray into agentic AI.

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Meta doubles down on custom inference chips after reportedly scrapping training chip

Meta said today that it’s expanding its custom silicon development to include four new generations of Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) chips. The announcement comes just weeks after The Information reported that the social media company had scrapped its most advanced AI training chip, dubbed Olympus, after facing design challenges. In the meantime, it signed outside chip deals with Nvidiaand Advanced Micro Devices.

Early in its recent conference call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sought to reassure investors that the custom chip specialist’s relationship with the social media giant was only getting stronger.

“Now contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator MTIA road map is alive and well,” he said. “We’re shipping now.”

The new road map suggests Meta’s in-house chips will focus more on inference, which has more predictable workloads, over training — a technically more demanding area dominated by Nvidia:

“MTIA 300 will be used for ranking and recommendations training, and is already in production. MTIA 400, 450 and 500 will be capable of handling all workloads, but we will primarily use these chips to support GenAI inference production in the near future and into 2027.”

Meta CFO Susan Li told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s tech conference earlier this month that the company “eventually” plans to expand its custom chip design to include training models.

Expanding Meta’s Custom Silicon to Power Our AI Workloads

Early in its recent conference call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sought to reassure investors that the custom chip specialist’s relationship with the social media giant was only getting stronger.

“Now contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator MTIA road map is alive and well,” he said. “We’re shipping now.”

The new road map suggests Meta’s in-house chips will focus more on inference, which has more predictable workloads, over training — a technically more demanding area dominated by Nvidia:

“MTIA 300 will be used for ranking and recommendations training, and is already in production. MTIA 400, 450 and 500 will be capable of handling all workloads, but we will primarily use these chips to support GenAI inference production in the near future and into 2027.”

Meta CFO Susan Li told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s tech conference earlier this month that the company “eventually” plans to expand its custom chip design to include training models.

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Google completes acquisition of Wiz — its biggest ever

Today Google said it has completed its $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity startup Wiz, the largest deal in the company’s history.

“This acquisition is an investment by Google Cloud to improve cloud security and enable organizations to build fast and securely across any cloud or AI platform,” the company wrote in the press release.

The companies agreed to the all-cash purchase last year, after quite a bit of back-and-forth.

Alphabet updated acquisitions chart — Sherwood News

Google Completes Acquisition of Wiz

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Uber jumps on news it’s partnering with Amazon’s Zoox in Las Vegas and Los Angeles

Uber jumped premarket after announcing it will offer rides in Amazon-owned Zoox autonomous vehicles on its platform in Las Vegas later this summer and Los Angeles in the middle of next year, as part of a multiyear agreement. Zoox is currently testing in 10 US markets, while it’s available to the public in Las Vegas and select users in the Bay Area.

Uber separately announced a partnership with Serve Robotics and White Castle today to deliver food in Serve’s autonomous sidewalk robots.

Zoox is partnering with Uber | Zoox

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Tesla accelerates AI agent push as xAI’s Macrohard falters

Painting “MACROHARD” on the roof of an xAI data center hasn’t been enough to bring the company’s core AI office worker to life. Business Insider reports that the effort to compete with Microsoft has stalled amid staff and leadership departures and what appears to be a hiring freeze.

At the same time, Elon Musk’s public company, Tesla, seems to be accelerating its own AI agent project, dubbed “Digital Optimus.” It’s meant to perform tasks on a computer much like the Optimus robot would do in the real world.

Unlike Macrohard’s screenshot-based training approach, Tesla’s effort reportedly mirrors its Full Self-Driving system, processing information in real time rather than step by step.

Add this to the growing list of ways Musk’s empire is blurring together: SpaceX merged with xAI in February, and now Tesla appears to be absorbing one of xAI’s most ambitious projects, with some of Macrohard’s work and computing resources reportedly shifting to Tesla’s Autopilot team.

XAI's Macrohard project stalls as Tesla ramps up a similar AI agent effort

Unlike Macrohard’s screenshot-based training approach, Tesla’s effort reportedly mirrors its Full Self-Driving system, processing information in real time rather than step by step.

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Salesforce reportedly planning $25 billion bond sale to help fund $50 billion buyback

When Salesforce reported earnings last month, it announced a $50 billion share buyback as a show of confidence in its position at a time when investors are questioning AI’s impact on enterprise software. Now, to help fund that buyback, the company is reportedly seeking to sell up to $25 billion in debt — a record sum for Salesforce that could test investor appetite for a more leveraged balance sheet.

Moody’s Ratings called funding the buyback via a bond sale “a material shift in financial policy” and downgraded Salesforce’s credit rating to A2. S&P Global Ratings also lowered its outlook to negative.