Its just jeetslop, it just needs to exist long enough to be acquired by some boomer company

@dang - can we ban racist fuckwads from HN?

Name ID. They were around early and got their name out there. If you don't keep up with the blow-by-blow of the tech and the surrounding market, you may not know that there are better alternatives available.

>I forgot Perplexity even still existed. They went from all the rage to nobody talks about them anymore.

A lot of the early hype was driven by how liberally they were handing out free Pro memberships. For a while, every telco, bank, etc. was handing it out as a free promotional offer. I don't think anyone I know that raved about it ever gave them a single dime.

Their product was definitely cool for a few months, but they had zero moat to begin with (considering how quickly the frontier labs caught up), and the conversion rate on those free sign-ups must have been abysmal, especially after they nerfed the free Pro subscriptions on both quality and quantity dimensions, and their own "politically neutral" DeepSeek R1 distillation didn't pan out.

What moat does anyone have? Google wrote the "we have no moat" memo and they're literally Google (better hardware, better data, billions of users...)

ChatGPT has the name, and Anthropic has ... the writing style is less cringe? (Well, it used to be, anyway...)

If there's no moat then there's no need to be skeptical about a company with hundreds of millions in revenue. Their brand resonates well enough for that.