Comment by wat10000
11 hours ago
They don’t even need control. It’s a version of the old saying that if you owe the bank a million dollars then you have a problem, but if you owe a billion dollars then the bank has a problem. If your company is important enough then it’s not possible (at least not politically) to punish it significantly. See also: 2008 and “too big to fail.”
Perplexity is still a small startup. If Enron and Theranos could be published then Perplexity can be punished. So far it's unclear whether they've done anything illegal.
It’s very difficult to punish Perplexity without also hitting OpenAI, Grok, Google, Facebook, etc.
It’s plenty clear to me that they’ve broken copyright law a lot. They’ve downloaded copyrighted material without permission for their own use, which we’ve been assured is Not Good for us individual people. Some of them even redistributed it by seeding torrents, which is even more Not Good.
It only seems "plenty clear" to you because you're ignorant about the basics of copyright law in the USA and Japan. Fortunately we have actual courts to decide these issues. The applicable laws (including centuries of case law in the USA) are complex and whether particular actions are legal often depends on nuances that aren't covered in news articles.
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> Perplexity is still a small startup.
https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/perplexity-ai
I don’t know how to parse this. I don’t think of them as small. Though they were only founded in 2022 and may not have a huge number of employees, they have had 8 funding rounds. They’re private, so I don’t know what they have raised, but some say that the company could have a $18B valuation.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-07-17/ai-startu... | https://archive.is/6DZpo
Is that small?