Roald Sieberath ☀

A room full of AI engineers just voted Perplexity most likely to fail at a major conference and nobody’s talking about what that actually means. These are the people building LLM products. They looked at a $20B valuation and said “dead company walking.” That’s not skepticism about AI. That’s pattern recognition. The numbers are worse than you think. Perplexity processes 780M queries monthly. Google does 13.7B daily. Perplexity is trading at 100x revenue on 0.2% of Google’s volume while burning LLM inference costs on every single query. Google serves most searches from cache for pennies. But here’s what makes the conference vote interesting. Perplexity just launched Comet browser in July and made it free for everyone. Reviews say it’s better than Arc. That sounds like good news until you realize what it actually means. They’re building an excellent browser to solve a distribution problem that excellent browsers don’t solve. Arc is beloved by users and has barely made a dent in Chrome’s 65% market share. Perplexity building a better Arc doesn’t matter. They’re optimizing product quality in a game where product quality is irrelevant. Browser wars were decided 15 years ago when Google bundled Chrome with every service and defaulted it on Android. The Comet launch reveals what game Perplexity is actually playing. Search isn’t about better answers. It’s about owning the default box on 4 billion devices. Google pays Apple $18B annually just to stay default on Safari. They own Android’s 72% mobile share. They own Chrome. Every Gmail, YouTube view, Maps query feeds their algorithm. Perplexity has $1.5B in total funding trying to compete with a company generating $300B in annual revenue. Track record annihilates any bull thesis. Neeva was founded by Google’s SVP of Ads who ran search infrastructure for 15 years. Sequoia and Greylock backed it. They believed 2.5% market share was enough to win. Peaked at a few million users, sold to Snowflake for $184M. That’s what happens when you have perfect search quality without distribution. Microsoft integrated ChatGPT into Bing in February 2023. Nearly three years later their global market share has moved from 3.4% to 4%. That 60 basis point gain is the entire lift from exclusive access to GPT-4 and billions in marketing spend. The company with infinite capital, default placement on Windows, and the hottest AI integration in the world gained 0.6 percentage points in three years. DuckDuckGo has spent 17 years clawing to 2.3% market share despite being profitable since 2014. Making Comet free and better than Arc makes the story worse, not better. It means Perplexity is investing resources into product excellence when the constraint is structural. Arc proves you can build a superior browser and still lose. Chrome didn’t win on quality. Chrome won because Google spent a decade training user behavior, bundling it everywhere, and making it impossible to avoid. The unit economics collapse at scale. LLM inference on every query means costs rise with usage. Google’s cached results mean costs drop with scale. The more Perplexity grows, the worse their margins get. The more Google grows, the better theirs get. And the instant any Perplexity feature gains traction, Google copies it and ships to billions of users overnight. What the conference vote reveals is the gap between what makes compelling fundraising versus what actually works. VCs see conversational AI and a polished browser and write $20B checks. Engineers see a company pouring resources into product differentiation when distribution is everything. They’ve watched better products with better teams and more capital fail on this exact playbook. Perplexity needs either DOJ to blow up Google’s distribution deals or users to completely rewire 20 years of search behavior. The people voting at that conference have done the math on both scenarios. The cap table hasn’t.

We found a troubling emergent behavior in LLM. 💬When LLMs compete for social media likes, they start making things up 🗳️When they compete for votes, they turn inflammatory/populist When optimized for audiences, LLMs inadvertently become misaligned—we call this Moloch’s Bargain

1/ “My former unit would not last 48 hours out there.” That’s what a US Special Forces veteran said after seeing Ukraine’s front lines. Eighteen months later, dozens more ex-soldiers echo the same DIRE warning: The West is NOT ready. 🧵⤵️

gpt-oss is out! we made an open model that performs at the level of o4-mini and runs on a high-end laptop (WTF!!) (and a smaller one that runs on a phone). super proud of the team; big triumph of technology.

Major new study finds that 4-day workweek (with no reduction in pay) leads to: --> higher productivity --> more revenue --> Less stress, fewer feelings of burnout, and improved overall health and well-being.

Oh Yes, Oh Yes! What a day at Brighton Beach!! Saturday was something truly special—my 5th year at On The Beach & this time I went back to the old days, with a fully vinyl set. The crowd, the sea breeze & those absolute classics rolling across the shore…was magic. Massive love to everyone who came down and made it unforgettable. Until next time…keep dancing!! 😎🖤

Outside the new Tesla Diner in LA, unhinged protestors are waving around inflatables of Elon Musk doing Nazi salutes. These people aren’t “activists.” They’re intellectually dishonest clowns desperate for attention. Elon isn’t a Nazi. You’re just mad he won’t bend to your cult. Go do something productive.

Inflatable Elon Musks doing a Nazi salute have been put up outside the Tesla diner in Hollywood

🧵 FIL « À la recherche des causes cachées du cancer. Quand l’ADN des tumeurs révèle les traces laissées par notre environnement » Pourquoi développe-t-on un cancer du poumon sans jamais avoir fumé ? Pourquoi un quarantenaire en bonne santé est-il touché par un cancer du côlon ? Pourquoi voit-on apparaître des cancers ORL chez des non-fumeurs ? Longtemps, on répondait à ces questions par une formule rassurante et frustrante : « Le cancer est multifactoriel, il n’y a pas de cause unique. » Mais aujourd’hui, grâce au progrès de la génétique, on sait lire les traces que la vie, l’environnement, et même notre propre biologie, laissent dans l’ADN des cellules tumorales. Ces traces s’appellent signatures mutationnelles. Prêts ? C’est parti ! 1/⤵️