American artificial intelligence company Perplexity AI just made a headline-grabbing pitch— a $34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome. This is nearly double the valuation of the AI-powered search and answer engine, which is valued at $14 billion.
The offer to buy Google Chrome comes even as Alphabet Inc made no offer to sell its search engine.
Perplexity, which already has an AI browser, claimed that multiple funds have offered to finance the deal, reported Reuters. If such a deal takes place, it will give Perplexity an edge over more popular and bigger rivals like ChatGPT, owned by OpenAI.
An Indian at the top
One of the co-founders of Perplexity, which boasts of over 22 million users, is an Indian-origin man, Aravind Srinivas, who is also the CEO of the company. He co-founded the company with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski in 2022.
Hailing from Chennai, Aravind Srinivas completed his B.Tech and M.Tech. from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. He also has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley.
He began his career as a research intern with OpenAI and later also worked as a research intern with Google. In 2021, joined OpenAI as a Research Scientist, focusing on language and diffusion generative models.
According to his LinkedIn profile, he has been with Perplexity as co-founder as CEO from August 2022.
He is also an angel investor in various companies, including Cursor (AI-first Code Editor), Eleven Labs (AI Voices), Mistral (AI Foundation Models), Cognition Labs (AI Software Engineer), Pika Labs (AI Videos), Suno (AI Music), Cartesia (Real Time Multimodal AI), LiveKit (RTC API for multimodal AI), Udio (AI Music), Antimetal (AI to optimize cloud costs), Ray (AI Fitness Coach), Silurian (AI for Weather Prediction), Fal AI (Multimodal Generative AI Inference).