#perplexity

#perplexity

Like it or not, artificial intelligence is becoming a fixture in the classroom. This is being pushed along at a brisk pace by tech companies eager to get their products into the hands of millions of students. On Thursday, Perplexity became the latest AI developer to offer a back-to-school special: Students can access of Comet, the company's AI-centered web browsing platform that debuted in July to rival Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari. The browser is currently available through Perplexity Pro, which costs $200 annually.

Quick recap: Perplexity announced a new kind of subscription called Comet Plus. Users can pay $5 a month to access content from Perplexity's publisher partners-that is, those who sign up to participate-and Perplexity passes on most of the revenue to them. It's already set aside $42.5 million to kick-start the program, according to CEO Aravind Srinivas. Although the program is named after the company's new Comet web browser, users can use any browser to access the content via Perplexity.

Invites to Perplexity's new AI-powered web browser, Comet, are one of the web's hottest commodities these days. The new product was made available first to the AI firm's $200-per-month Max subscribers and a small group of invitees. But now there's a new way to jump ahead on the waitlist. On Wednesday, PayPal announced it's giving its customers, including PayPal and Venmo users, early access to Comet as well as a free year's subscription to Perplexity Pro, normally $200 per year.

Unlike the lump-sum AI training and content licensing deals favored by Amazon, Meta and OpenAI, it's building revenue share models that incentivize it to continue compensating publishers. But there are some major hurdles. In theory, the revenue share model around Perplexity's Comet Plus subscription tier announced this week sounds pretty good: publishers are paid based on how often their content is visited by humans and crawled by bots on its AI-powered browser Comet.

Producers are trying to figure out more ways to pad their budgets. They're taking more of an active interest in the space.

The BBC's claims are just one more part of the overwhelming evidence that the BBC will do anything to preserve Google's illegal monopoly.

A major hardware deal could change that.