Is Perplexity Worth $15 Billion?

Before we get into today’s column, leaders at OpenAI have told some employees that GPT-4.5—the model known internally as Orion—will be released this week, according to a person with knowledge of the conversations.

Don’t get too excited though. A person who’s tested the model told us that its performance on certain tasks have been mixed; for instance, Anthropic’s recently-released Claude 3.7 Sonnet beats it on certain benchmarks, the person said.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised. In November, we broke the news that OpenAI had been seeing slowing improvements from training new models. That’s pushed them to focus more on their “o” reasoning models and a concept called “test-time compute,” where you spend more computational resources when users ask questions versus during the training process. And earlier this month, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said on X that the company would work on combining its GPT-series and o-series models into a single AI after the release of GPT-4.5.

Now, onto today’s column...

The relative dearth of breakout hits among startups developing generative artificial intelligence apps for consumers means that those with any traction can raise money at steep valuations.

Case in point: Perplexity, the plucky AI search engine that’s known for its CEO’s hot takes on X. Some investors have recently offered to put money into the three-year-old startup at a valuation of more than $15 billion, up from $9 billion at which it was valued in an equity financing just two months ago, according to a person who has been involved in the conversations. 

The talks are in early stages, and the startup doesn’t seem to be seriously considering the offer, for now, according to the person involved in the discussions and a second person with knowledge of the situation.

But if it does go through, the fundraising would be the fourth round raised by Perplexity in the last 12 months—an outstanding pace even by the white-hot standards of AI deals.