Perplexity is in talks to raise again, as the battle for second in the AI chatbot race heats up

The latest funding round could peg Perplexity at a $14 billion valuation.

5/14/25 5:56AM

Like a lot of AI startups, Perplexity isn’t having a hard time finding new investors.

According to exclusive reporting by The Wall Street Journal, the company is in closing talks for a new $500 million funding round that would see it valued at a whopping $14 billion. For context on just how quickly valuations are still soaring in the AI sphere, Perplexity closed a funding round in November that saw its valuation reach $9 billion… which was already triple what the startup was worth just six months before that.

Though it’s certainly had its critics, the company’s eponymous AI search engine has proved popular since its release in late 2022, while plans to launch Comet — an AI-powered browser that could land as soon as this month — clearly have investors excited as well. In the ever-expanding universe of AI tools and chatbots, though, OpenAI’s star still shines brightest.

ChatGPT domination chart — Sherwood News

ChatGPT has been breaking its own traffic records every month of the year so far, hitting an almighty 780 million visits from American users in April, while web-based versions of other AI efforts have yet to build anywhere near as much steam. Indeed, discounting rivals from Big Tech giants like Meta’s new MetaAI platform or Google’s Gemini, ChatGPT really is a deus amid machinas, clocking over 8.5x more April site visits than the web versions of DeepSeek, Perplexity, Anthropic’s Claude, and Elon Musk’s Grok combined.

Among those chatbots and AI search engines not set up by Sam Altman or trillion-dollar tech companies, DeepSeek — the Chinese startup whose R1 model rocked AI stocks in January — leads the way, though it has lost momentum more recently.

AI platform visits chart — Sherwood News

Since DeepSeek burst onto the scene, causing a flurry of hurried explainers and inspiring a wave of online evangelists, tens of millions have flocked to sample the chatbot, reportedly built at a fraction of the cost of OpenAI’s flagship model. Still, monthly visit numbers are slipping from the February peak of 43 million.

Jon Keegan4h

OpenAI’s hot Sora video app is a copyright lawsuit waiting to happen

OpenAI has generated some serious buzz surrounding its new Sora video generation app. The app is currently No. 3 on the iOS free app leaderboards, even though it’s invitation-only for the time being.

But users have been flooding social media with videos generated by Sora, and in addition to a “Skibidi Toilet” Sam Altman and the OpenAI CEO dressed as a Nazi, the app is able to create videos featuring iconic characters from Disney, Nintendo, and Paramount Skydance.

On the system card for the Sora 2 AI model (which powers the Sora app), OpenAI says it was trained on things found on the internet:

“Sora 2 was trained on diverse datasets, including information that is publicly available on the internet, information that we partner with third parties to access, and information that our users or human trainers and researchers provide or generate.”

This seems like an invitation for a big copyright lawsuit, along the lines of the one Disney, Dreamworks, and NBCUniversal recently filed against AI image generator Midjourney.

But OpenAI is trying to flip the responsibility of protecting copyrighted material to the intellectual property owners themselves. According to The Wall Street Journal, OpenAI is allowing copyrighted material in Sora by default, unless copyright holders opt out of the service.

The courts will have to decide if this novel approach to intellectual copyright law works, but government regulators may not be that big of a problem, as Altman has made sure OpenAI is in the good graces of the Trump administration. If OpenAI has to pay up to copyright holders after a lawsuit, what’s a few billion dollars here or there when you’re raising so much capital?

OpenAI’s AI video app stirs copyright questions, pumping out videos of Mario and Pikachu

On the system card for the Sora 2 AI model (which powers the Sora app), OpenAI says it was trained on things found on the internet:

“Sora 2 was trained on diverse datasets, including information that is publicly available on the internet, information that we partner with third parties to access, and information that our users or human trainers and researchers provide or generate.”

This seems like an invitation for a big copyright lawsuit, along the lines of the one Disney, Dreamworks, and NBCUniversal recently filed against AI image generator Midjourney.

Rani Molla

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Tension emerges between Meta’s AI teams

Discontent between Meta’s AI research teams is growing, according to a report by The Information, at a critical time for Meta’s effort to get back into the AI race.

Jon Keegan8h

Rani Molla

Mon-AI Mon-AI Mon-AI Mon-AI

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OpenAI beats SpaceX as most valuable private company, at $500 billion valuation

It also reached that valuation very quickly.