Travis, your thoughts on this category? Anything come to mind for you in terms of feature sets that would be extraordinary here? I know you like to think about products and the consumer experience.
It's really interesting. So, I've been spending my time on real estate and construction and robotics. And so I've been out of this kind of consumer software game for a long time. But it's super interesting over the last six months. There have been a number of consumer software CEOs. Like when I hang out with them, they're like, 'Yo, how are we going to keep doing what we do when the agents take over?'
Yeah. The paradigm shift is so profound that the idea that you would visit a web page goes away and you're just in a chat dial. You have an agent that's just taking care of your flights for you.
So, I think there's a leapfrog over that. I think it's just like you tell something, 'Yo, I want to go to New York. Can you find something I'm probably going to like and give me a couple options?'
Yeah. And it's a whole new interface. Is Perplexity this thing that you just showed? Is that the interface or do I just have an agent that goes and does everything for me? Is this the start of that? I just haven't spent enough time. I do know that every consumer software CEO that has an app in the app store is tripping. They're tripping right now.
And I mean big boys. I meet guys with real stuff and sometimes I'm doing almost like therapy sessions with them. I'm like, 'It's gonna be fine. You actually have stuff. You have real stuff that's of value. They can't replace it with an agent.' And they're like,
So, you're lying to them. You're doing hospice care and you're telling them everything's going to be okay, but the patient is checking options on Robin Hood while he's like, 'Yeah, tell me more.'
All these things. There's certain things that are protected. There's certain things that aren't. That's all.
Well, let's talk about that because you and I are old enough to remember General Magic. This vision was out there a long time ago with personal digital assistants and you would just talk to an agent. It would go do this for you. This feels like a step to that where it does all the work for you, presents you the final moment and says approve.
Like a concierge or a butler. Yeah.
I think what you're describing is what we want. But I think more specifically for today, Keith and Travis totally nail it. Look, I think building a browser is an absolutely stupid capital allocation decision. Just totally stupid and unjustifiable in 2025. Specifically for Perplexity, I think their path to building a legacy business is to replace Bloomberg. Everything that they've done in financial information and financial data in going beyond the model has been excellent. As somebody who's paid $25,000 to Bloomberg for many years, the terminal is atrocious. It's terrible. It's not very good. It's very limited. And anybody that could build a better product would take over a hundred billion dollar enterprise because I think it's there for the taking. I wish that Perplexity would double and triple down on that. And so when you see this kind of random spraw,
Let's do it, Jimoth. Let's just go do it.
When you do the random spraw, I think it doesn't work. But I just want to say a browser is like the dumbest thing to build in 2025 because in a world of agents, what is a browser? It's a glorified markup reader. It's handling HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It's doing some networking, security, and rendering. But it's like this is all under the water type stuff. I get it that we had to deal with all that nonsense in 1998 to try Lycos or Google for the first time. But in 2025, there's something that you just speak to and eventually there's probably something that's in your brain which you just think and it just does it. You're thinking, 'I need a flight to JFK' or at the maximum today in a very elegant beautiful search bar you type in 'get me a flight' and it already knows what to do.
Keith, in some ways this is a step towards that ultimate vision. So you'd think it's worth it for Perplexity to make this waypoint perhaps if you look at it as a waypoint between the ultimate vision which is a command line and earpiece.
How do you get distribution, Jason, for the 19th web browser in 2025? Well, that is a challenge and I think most people are speculating Apple, which has a lot of users, might buy Perplexity or do a deal with Perplexity and give them that distribution because of the Justice Department case against Google. So, there's been a lot of speculation about that. But Keith, what do you think?
Well, I don't think they'd buy anything worth it. Like, what is Apple going to get? We continue this failed strategy of Apple, right? Apple's missed every possible window on AI and continues to miss it. It has cultural challenges, I think the CEO has challenges, I think culturally they have challenges, I think they have infrastructure challenges. So it's not an easy fix, but buying Perplexity is not going to help. The vertical strategy is actually a pretty coherent one for Perplexity. So I think pick a vertical and own it strategy in this case is not a bad idea, especially because you need unique data sources. Some of those data sources may or may not license their data to OpenAI. So you can do some clever things there, but I don't think there's any residual value that Apple will get out of Perplexity except there's some product taste. But what are you going to spend like a billion dollars for product taste? I mean, Mark's spending hundreds of millions or hundreds of billions or whatever he's spending these days, and Grok if anything shows that Mark really doesn't need to just spend money to build a whole new team because everything they've done in AI is also missed the boat.
Well, Keith, the way you phrase it there almost makes it worth it for Apple to throw a Hail Mary, have a team with some taste because that's how they tend to do things, something that is elegant. And why not just throw your search to it, throw 10 billion at what's elegant? Would be if there's a bunch of agents and just a chat box.
Seeing a bunch of visual diarrhea is not elegant.
