Amazon Wins Suit Against Perplexity, Blocking AI Shopping Agent

(Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Perp walk

Perplexity has been left behind in the AI wars

Once touted as a potential Google killer, the AI search engine’s traffic has been flat over the last year, while peers like Claude have surged ahead.

David Crowther, Claire Yubin Oh

Last summer, Perplexity was hot stuff. The CEO of the AI-powered research tool was on the front cover of Fortune magazine, the company itself was about to make a long-shot $34.5 billion offer to buy Google Chrome from Alphabet, and executives at Apple were warning that traditional internet search was starting to feel the pain as users switched to services like ChatGPT and Perplexity.

But a year later, Perplexity’s progress has stalled out.

Per data from Similarweb, US website traffic to perplexity.ai has been broadly flat, adding fewer than 4 million visitors from February 2025 to February 2026, while rival Claude more than quadrupled its web users.

How did perplexity get left behind in the AI wars — Sherwood News

Naturally, Perplexity lags even further behind the true giants of the GenAI game, ChatGPT and Gemini, which racked up 1 billion and 276 million US monthly website visits, respectively, in February.

Confused, baffled, bewildered

From the start, Perplexity was structured somewhat differently to ChatGPT and others. Its primary function was to answer questions as precisely as possible, with its powerful citation framework making it a research tool for many. It isn’t a frontier model maker, instead relying on some of the very LLMs that it competes against for users.

But as models like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have progressed, what made Perplexity special has become table stakes. Each is now pretty adept at complex, research-based tasks, with Google incorporating Gemini’s real-time AI overviews and ChatGPT adding answers with citations. Anthropic’s success in the enterprise market, targeting professional use cases with Claude, has even shifted the entire industry toward agentic AI — tools that can execute on tasks.

It’s almost hard not to feel sorry for Perplexity, considering the company’s three biggest competitors are: the most well-funded startup in history, Google, and the second-most well-funded startup in history. Throw in a number of bitter lawsuits and legal tensions, including from major news publishers and forums like Reddit, and Perplexity’s offering has become increasingly difficult to execute on and increasingly available elsewhere. Just yesterday, in fact, a federal judge temporarily blocked Perplexity from accessing and scraping Amazon with its Comet browser — another obstacle to its foray into agentic AI.

$26B

Jon Keegan23m

Nvidia is planning on spending $26 billion to train its own AI open-weights models, according to a 2025 financial filing. Wired was first to report the information. Nvidia has released several of its own AI models, including the Nemotron reasoning model, as well as specialized ones for specific tasks.

Nvidia making its own large frontier models could allow the company to go head-to-head against some of its biggest AI customers.

Rani Molla3h

Musk blurs the boundaries of his companies even more with joint xAI-Tesla AI agent project

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said Wednesday that Tesla and xAI, which is part of SpaceX, would work on a joint AI agent project called “Macrohard,” also referred to as “Digital Optimus,” as part of Tesla’s $2 billion investment in xAI. The collaboration would pair Grok with what Musk described as a real-time computer-controlling AI agent running on Tesla hardware.

In his post, Musk said Grok would serve as the higher-level “System 2” reasoning layer, directing “Digital Optimus,” a faster “System 1” system that processes the last five seconds of screen video and keyboard and mouse inputs to take action. He claimed the system would run inexpensively on Tesla’s low-cost AI4 chip alongside more expensive Nvidia chips at xAI, and suggested it could, “in principle,” emulate the function of entire companies. “No other company can yet do this,” he said.

Macrohard or Digital Optimus is a joint xAI-Tesla project, coming as part of Tesla’s investment agreement with xAI.

Grok is the master conductor/navigator with deep understanding of the world to direct digital Optimus, which is processing and actioning the past 5 secs of…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 11, 2026

Business Insider reported earlier Wednesday that Tesla was taking up the AI agent mantle as xAI’s similar project stalled, but Musk’s post suggests the initiatives are more intertwined than previously understood.

The collaboration marks the latest example of Musk’s companies working closely together, further blurring the lines between Tesla and the recently merged SpaceX–xAI entity.

Rani Molla5h

Meta doubles down on custom inference chips after reportedly scrapping training chip

Meta said today that it’s expanding its custom silicon development to include four new generations of Meta Training and Inference Accelerator (MTIA) chips. The announcement comes just weeks after The Information reported that the social media company had scrapped its most advanced AI training chip, dubbed Olympus, after facing design challenges. In the meantime, it signed outside chip deals with Nvidiaand Advanced Micro Devices.

Early in its recent conference call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sought to reassure investors that the custom chip specialist’s relationship with the social media giant was only getting stronger.

“Now contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator MTIA road map is alive and well,” he said. “We’re shipping now.”

The new road map suggests Meta’s in-house chips will focus more on inference, which has more predictable workloads, over training — a technically more demanding area dominated by Nvidia:

“MTIA 300 will be used for ranking and recommendations training, and is already in production. MTIA 400, 450 and 500 will be capable of handling all workloads, but we will primarily use these chips to support GenAI inference production in the near future and into 2027.”

Meta CFO Susan Li told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s tech conference earlier this month that the company “eventually” plans to expand its custom chip design to include training models.

Expanding Meta’s Custom Silicon to Power Our AI Workloads

Early in its recent conference call, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan sought to reassure investors that the custom chip specialist’s relationship with the social media giant was only getting stronger.

“Now contrary to recent analyst reports, Meta’s custom accelerator MTIA road map is alive and well,” he said. “We’re shipping now.”

The new road map suggests Meta’s in-house chips will focus more on inference, which has more predictable workloads, over training — a technically more demanding area dominated by Nvidia:

“MTIA 300 will be used for ranking and recommendations training, and is already in production. MTIA 400, 450 and 500 will be capable of handling all workloads, but we will primarily use these chips to support GenAI inference production in the near future and into 2027.”

Meta CFO Susan Li told attendees at Morgan Stanley’s tech conference earlier this month that the company “eventually” plans to expand its custom chip design to include training models.

Rani Molla5h

Google completes acquisition of Wiz — its biggest ever

Today Google said it has completed its $32 billion acquisition of cybersecurity startup Wiz, the largest deal in the company’s history.

“This acquisition is an investment by Google Cloud to improve cloud security and enable organizations to build fast and securely across any cloud or AI platform,” the company wrote in the press release.

The companies agreed to the all-cash purchase last year, after quite a bit of back-and-forth.

Alphabet updated acquisitions chart — Sherwood News

Google Completes Acquisition of Wiz

Rani Molla7h

Uber jumps on news it’s partnering with Amazon’s Zoox in Las Vegas and Los Angeles

Uber jumped premarket after announcing it will offer rides in Amazon-owned Zoox autonomous vehicles on its platform in Las Vegas later this summer and Los Angeles in the middle of next year, as part of a multiyear agreement. Zoox is currently testing in 10 US markets, while it’s available to the public in Las Vegas and select users in the Bay Area.

Uber separately announced a partnership with Serve Robotics and White Castle today to deliver food in Serve’s autonomous sidewalk robots.