Does Perplexity’s “answer engine” threaten Google?

Mr Srinivas is a student of disruption. When a podcaster asked him recently to compare the cultures of OpenAI and DeepMind, he explained how the engineer-led, free-wheeling approach of the former disrupted what he called the research-obsessed “very British” hierarchy of the latter (which was founded in London). He resorts to disruption theory when discussing Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Rather than explaining how Perplexity’s business model will enable it to attack the search giant, he uses a celebrated concept outlined in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”, a management bestseller from 1997 by Clayton Christensen, to identify what he sees as Alphabet’s Achilles heel. He is not alone. The innovator’s dilemma has been invoked to explain why Google is threatened by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and by other generative-AI sites such as You.com. The argument is seductive. But it is off the mark.