Perplexity Raising Billions | 2 Min AI + Tech

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Google’s new AI lets you edit images by asking

There's a new Google AI model in town, and it can generate or edit images as easily as it can create text—as part of its chatbot conversation. The results aren't perfect, but it's quite possible everyone in the near future will be able to manipulate images this way.

Last Wednesday, Google expanded access to Gemini 2.0 Flash's native image-generation capabilities, making the experimental feature available to anyone using Google AI Studio. Previously limited to testers since December, the multimodal technology integrates both native text and image processing capabilities into one AI model.

The new model, titled "Gemini 2.0 Flash (Image Generation) Experimental," flew somewhat under the radar last week, but it has been garnering more attention over the past few days due to its ability to remove watermarks from images, albeit with artifacts and a reduction in image quality.

Perplexity Gets More Money

AI-powered search startup Perplexity is said to be in early talks to raise up to $1 billion in a new funding round valuing the startup at $18 billion.

Bloomberg, citing a person familiar with the matter, reported on Thursday that Perplexity’s annual recurring revenue has now reached $100 million.

Perplexity’s valuation has soared in recent years. This new round would double Perplexity’s current valuation — $9 billion — as of December. In April 2024, Perplexity was valued at $1 billion.

Rumors of a new round come as competition in the AI-powered search space heats up.

On Thursday, Anthropic added web search to its consumer AI chatbot, Claude. Earlier in March, Google launched an early version of a chat-based AI search engine, called AI Mode, for a limited group of testers.

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