Perplexity is a year-old AI startup whose conversational “answer engine” has gained attention as a potential challenger to conventional search. Two months ago the venture raised $73.6 million in Series B funding from investors including Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos via his Bezos Expeditions, resulting in a valuation of about $520 million. Now the company is said to be finalizing another cash infusion that is predicted to double its valuation to roughly $1 billion. The current financing round is reportedly being led by former Y Combinator partner Daniel Gross through his own investment fund. Continue reading AI Startup Perplexity Targets $1B Valuation with New Funding

New AI-powered coding tools such as Amazon’s CodeWhisperer and Copilot from GitHub and OpenAI may be giving some developers the jitters. Following splashy debuts for both programs last week, GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke offered public assurances that Copilot is not designed to replace coders, but to speed the process, alleviating a software developer shortage. Similar to Copilot, CodeWhisperer can autocomplete Java, JavaScript and Python functions based on a comment or some keystrokes. Amazon says it trained the system using billions of lines of open source code, publicly available documentation and its own codebase. Continue reading AI Coding Tools Speed Process to Offset Developer Shortage