It is one of Silicon Valley’s legendary investments. In 1998, a 34-year-old Jeff Bezos gave $US250,000 ($377,825) to a pair of Stanford University students who had developed a new type of search engine . At the time, it was a risky bet. Most people browsed the web by using “portals” like Yahoo or by remembering their favourite sites; it was not obvious that searches would be a profitable business. But when Google went public in 2004, Bezos’s stake was worth $US280 million.
If he had held on to it, it would now be worth billions. So in January, when the Amazon founder invested in a company seeking to take Google’s place in the food chain, people sat up and took notice. Bezos took part in a $US74 million investment in Perplexity, a San Francisco start-up that aims to answer queries with artificial intelligence rather than a list of links. Type a question into the app – how to roast a chicken – and it will confidently answer with a couple of sentences and a few bullet points, rather than the list of links that made Google famous
Source: Tech Daily Report (techdailyreport.net)
Jeff Bezos Perplexity Google Investment Artificial Intelligence Search Engine