Perplexity accused of scraping websites that explicitly blocked AI scraping

AI startup Perplexity is crawling and scraping content from websites that have explicitly indicated they don’t want to be scraped, according to internet infrastructure provider Cloudflare. On Monday, Cloudflare published research saying it observed the AI startup ignore blocks and hide its crawling and scraping activities. The network infrastructure giant accused Perplexity of obscuring its…

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Meta held talks to buy Thinking Machines, Perplexity, and Safe Superintelligence

At this point, it’s becoming easier to say which AI startups Mark Zuckerberg hasn’t looked at acquiring. In addition to Ilya Sutskever’s Safe Superintelligence (SSI), sources tell me the Meta CEO recently discussed buying ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s Thinking Machines Lab and Perplexity, the AI-native Google rival. None of these talks progressed to the formal…

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Perplexity brings ads to its platform

AI-powered search engine Perplexity says it’ll begin experimenting with ads on its platform starting this week. Ads will appear in the U.S. to start, formatted as “sponsored follow-up questions.” (E.g., “How can I use LinkedIn to enhance my job search?”) Paid media will be positioned to the side of answers, and labeled as “sponsored.” Brands…

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‘They wish this technology didn’t exist’: Perplexity responds to News Corp’s lawsuit

Perplexity shot back at media companies skeptical of AI’s benefits in a blog post Thursday, responding to News Corp’s lawsuit filed against the startup earlier this week. The lawsuit alleged Perplexity engaged in large-scale copyright violations against Dow Jones and the NY Post. Several other media organizations — including Forbes, The New York Times, and…

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