00:00 Speaker A
We also have some breaking news here. Artificial intelligence startup Perplexity, um, offered to buy Google’s Chrome browser for $34 and a half billion dollars. That is according to the Wall Street Journal. Now, as we know, um, there is a court case going through where by Google might be forced to sell Chrome. And so now Perplexity stepping in here, according to the journal, and making this offer. Interestingly enough, whereas, uh, it’s making this offer reportedly for $34 and a half billion dollars. Perplexity’s own valuation is reportedly only $18 billion dollars. But according to the journal, Perplexity has gotten backing from some large venture capital funds that then would allow it to make this size of a transaction. Now, if the judge is going to force Google to sell off Chrome, having an offer outstanding, would it make it more likely that the judge can come out and do that? That is sort of the question here. Google itself has not really said that it wants to sell Chrome, right? It has maintained that it wants to keep these businesses together, that they do work together well here. Uh, Perplexity, one of the startups, uh, within the generative AI business that has really, um, gained some market share, and it actually recently released its own web browser to some of its users here. So we’ll continue to watch the situation. If you look at those Alphabet shares, they’re actually not moving much in reaction to these headlines, um, and it doesn’t seem that it is the base case of many analysts we’ve spoken to that Alphabet will be forced to break up. So we’ll see what this latest development means for that whole situation.
