

Not sure if there’s such a thing as a “good” AI company but I gather this is one that achieved its position via shady practices and is privately funded to serve ultra-wealthy interests.
Perplexity AI has attracted legal scrutiny over allegations of copyright infringement, unauthorized content use, and trademark issues from several major media organizations, including the BBC, Dow Jones, and The New York Times. According to separate analyses by Wired and later Cloudflare, Perplexity uses undisclosed web crawlers with spoofed user-agent strings to scrape the content of news websites who disallow or explicitly block web scraping.
Promoting companies like this is part of the more fundamental issue with Firefox’s funding model. The Mozilla Foundation uses Firefox as a cash cow by doing deals with devils (chiefly Google), putting some of the money back into Firefox while the rest goes toward activities the foundation sees as forces for good. You might call that irony or ingenuity, or both, but we’re stuck with it absent roughly five million users pitching in 50 bucks every year, at least based on current development costs.


The trick or treaters in our area were so cautious not to be a nuisance - had a skeleton in the front garden bed but many walked by unsure because we didn’t have a sign specifically inviting them to knock for lollies. Those that did were very polite and thankful.
Least of our worries when it comes to malign US influence. What really needs a smack in the mouth is our Google/Apple/etc. dependency.