Perplexity is building a browser in part to collect customer data for targeted ads

AI company Perplexity announced in February that it was building its own browser called Comet. In a recent ">interview with the TBPN podcast, CEO Aravind Srinivas gave some insight as to why the business appeared to be branching out from its artificial intelligence focus: It's to collect user data and sell them targeted advertisements.

"That’s kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to build a browser, is we want to get data even outside the app to better understand you," he said. “We plan to use all the context to build a better user profile and, maybe you know, through our discover feed we could show some ads there.”

If that all sounds familiar, it could be become Google's Chrome browser has taken a similar approach. In fact, Comet is built on Chromium, the open-source browser base from Google. That's not to say Perplexity wouldn't take the chance to go straight to the source and acquire Chrome in the aftermath of Google's recent monopoly court ruling regarding online search. In the ongoing hearings about Google and its potential sale of Chrome, Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko said he thought Perplexity would be able to continue running the browser at its current scale. Unsurprisingly, he wasn't too keen on OpenAI acquiring the property.