The Technology Year in Stories: June 2024

December 28, 2024

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Perplexity was first founded in 2022 by co-founding quartet, Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho, Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski

We look at the articles that made the news in technology in 2024. Today, it is June's turn, featuring how AI climbed Perplexity and Amazon to success

Perplexity AI: A Startup Backed by Billion-Dollar Investors

Within less than two years of being launched, interest in Perplexity AI has exploded.

An AI chatbot-powered research engine, it is a conversational search AI model that is designed to answer queries using natural language predictive text.

It continues to generate answers for users using web-based sources, but also boasts the unique function of citing the webpage links it is generating its answers from.

As a whole, the company models itself as an alternative to traditional search engines.

Whereas normally, users can directly pose questions and receive concise answers, Perplexity has a conversational interface with a wide contextual awareness and personalisation to learn the user’s interests and preferences over time.

At the start of 2024, Perplexity AI was valued at US$500m - a figure that has now grown substantially - and now holds more than 10 million active users.

Company history: Powering the next wave of AI innovation

The company was first founded in 2022 by co-founding quartet, Aravind Srinivas, Johnny Ho, Denis Yarats and Andy Konwinski.

The founders come from a range of engineering and back-end systems backgrounds, with CEO Aravind Srinivas having previously worked at OpenAI as an AI researcher.

Likewise, Denis Yarats, the CTO, was an AI research scientist at Meta, Chief Strategy Officer Johnny Ho worked as an engineer at Quora, alongside Andy Konwinski who was on the founding team at Databricks.

Amazon Joins The $2tn Club: How AI is Reshaping Big Tech

The AI revolution is in full swing, transforming industries and driving unprecedented growth in the tech sector.

As companies race to develop and deploy AI technologies, the market is rewarding those at the forefront of this innovation.

While tech giants Microsoft and Google have been widely seen as leading the pack, Amazon has now joined an elite group of companies by reaching a US$2tn market capitalisation for the first time, underscoring the growing importance of AI in driving valuations and shaping the future of major tech players.

The e-commerce giant has been strategically positioning itself to capitalise on the AI boom, as highlighted recently by its CEO Andy Jassy, making key investments and developing new products to leverage this transformative technology.

“Gen AI may be the largest technology transformation since the cloud (which itself, is still in the early stages), and perhaps since the Internet,” he says.

Amazon has been strategically positioning itself to capitalise on the AI boom

“Unlike the mass modernisation of on-premises infrastructure to the cloud, where there’s work required to migrate, this Gen AI revolution will be built from the start on top of the cloud. The amount of societal and business benefits from the solutions that will be possible will astound us all.”

AWS: Critical infrastructure for companies looking to deploy AI applications

One of Amazon's primary strengths in the AI race is its cloud computing division, Amazon Web Services (AWS).

As the world's largest cloud services provider, AWS has seen renewed growth thanks to the surging adoption of AI technologies.

The cloud platform serves as a critical infrastructure for companies looking to develop and deploy AI applications, positioning Amazon at the forefront of this technological revolution.

Amazon has made strategic investments in several AI-focused startups, notably announcing a US$4bn investment in AI start-up Anthropic.

Additionally, Amazon has invested in Figure, a robotics firm, signaling its interest in the intersection of AI and robotics technologies.