Brian McCullough (0:04)

Welcome to the Tech Brew Ride home for Wednesday, August 13, 2025. I'm Brian McCullough. Today Perplexity offers to acquire Chrome, but how serious are they? Fine, says OpenAI. Have your GPT4O back. Are AI companions the next breakout AI business beyond coding help? And is GM getting back in the self driving car business for real this time? Here's what you missed today in the world of tech. Well, this is designed to get your attention. AI startup Perplexity has offered to acquire Chrome from Google for $34.5 billion. Now that is obviously significantly more than Perplexity's estimated $18 billion valuation. But that's okay, Perplexity says, because VC funds have agreed to back the deal. Quoting the Journal. Estimates of Chrome's enterprise value vary widely, but recent ones have ranged from 20 billion to $50 billion. U.S. district Judge Amit Mehta is weighing whether to force Google to sell the browser as a means of weakening Google's stranglehold on web search. Mehta last year ruled that Google illegally monopolized the search market and is expected to rule this month on how to restore competition. The Perplexity offer could be an attempt to signal to the judge that there is an interested buyer should he force a sale. In a letter to Sundar Pichai, chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, Perplexity said its offer to buy Chrome is designed to satisfy an antitrust remedy and highest public interest by placing Chrome with a capable independent operator. Founded in 2022, San Francisco based Perplexity recently released its own web browser, called Comet, to some of its users. Analysts say the judge is unlikely to force the company to sell Chrome, though he gave little indication of which way he was leaning during closing arguments earlier this year. He asked whether doing so would be a little cleaner and a little bit more elegant than other remedies aimed at improving search competition. End quote. Now our friend MG Siegler says what occurred to me when I heard this, which is essentially that this is clearly a marketing stunt and strategic signaling amid Google's antitrust uncertainty. I'll give Perplexity one thing. Making the offer $34.5 billion is a nice touch. It makes seem precise, like a business person put a lot of thought into this transparently silly marketing stunt. A non serious offer would be, say, $30 billion, but 34.5? There's clearly math there somewhere. I mean, if a VC fund were offered the chance to invest in a piece of software with 3.5 billion active users, they would do it every day of the week. Even if it takes $34.5 billion, well, we're narrowing down the funds that could help with such a buyout, but sure, why not? It would have the potential to transform perplexity from a second tier AI startup into the first tier immediately, and that first tier is currently worth $300 billion soon, perhaps $500 billion, maybe $200 billion and $170 billion with OpenAI, XAI and Anthropic, respectively. Perplexity's $18 billion valuation plus this new Chrome add on would zoom right past $50 billion. Wait, I'm taking this all way too seriously now. Again, this is clearly a marketing stunt, as it was the first time floated it, and just as it was when they floated buying TikTok too. Perplexity loves this and the press eats it up. And now I'm eating up the leftovers. Because guess what? Google is not selling Chrome. So this is like a strawman at an auction. Yes, the judge in the antitrust case against Google is set to rule soon on the Chrome remedy, but it still feels unlikely he will make Google do something with Chrome because it just doesn't make a ton of sense. Though Google is trying like hell to make it more sense for the judge by shoving Gemini into Chrome. I actually think Chrome is worth far more than that, at least to Google, but it's possible that it's also worth far less than that to anyone else, because a huge part of the value of Chrome to Google is not needing to pay another company for default placement in their browsers, like the 20 billion plus a year Google pays to Apple right now, which also may be going away with the antitrust changes. Imagine a world where Chrome doesn't exist, or more to the point, where Google doesn't own Chrome. They're going to be paying tens of billions more to others. How much is that worth to Google? A lot more than even $34.5 billion. That said, the value to others is likely in that massive user base. And if you remove Google from Chrome, it's hard to know where those users go. Do they stay? A lot of them surely would if Chrome, owned by someone else, was allowed to simply update the browser's already installed billions of times around the world. But if they had to redownload this newfangled Chrome, the situation gets more complicated fast. Look, I'm trying to be reasonable here. Perplexity's move is clearly a farcical publicity stunt, which they'd never admit, obviously, and I respect the hust to continually get outlets like the Wall Street Journal the New York Times and Bloomberg to write about your company. And it has the added benefit of adding pressure to the antitrust case, trying to showcase to the judge that others would be willing to buy Chrome from Google. All that said, Perplexity does this type of stuff a lot. Too much in my opinion. They should focus on building great products and a great sustainable business. The first product was good. I'm less sold on the other attempts, including, by the way, their first take on a web browser in Comet, which I got access to last week and am generally underwhelmed by certainly versus dia. Although I will say it's a lot like Chrome, a sort of uglier Chrome. I've long thought it made some sense for Apple to buy Perplexity, given not just the AI chops but the search element as well. But I've always been hesitant about the cultural fit and this kind of stuff just adds to that problem. Apple would have to be pretty desperate to buy up a team that constantly pulls such stunts. Bit of an AI omnibus segment for you now. First up, OpenAI has gone ahead and restored GPT4.O as one of the default options for all paid ChatGPT users, quoting VentureBeat. Paying ChatGPT subscribers will also get a new show additional models setting on by default that restores access to GPT4, 1. O3 and 04 mini. The latter two reasoning focused LLMs. When OpenAI CEO and co founder Sam Altman announced the change on X, he pledged that if the company ever removes GPT 4.0 in the future, it will give plenty of notice. The models can be found in the Picker menu at the top of the ChatGPT session screen on the web and on mobile and other apps. But OpenAI also added connectors for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google contacts in ChatGPT for pro users with Plus Team, Enterprise and Edge plans to follow. Quoting Bleeping Computer for those unaware, Connectors allow you to connect third party services to ChatGPT. Once a service has been connected, ChatGPT can reference it in the chat. For example, OpenAI recently added Dropbox support to GPT connectors. If you have dozens of files in your Dropbox, you can give ChatGPT access to the account and let it reference them in a future question or deep research. Similarly, ChatGPT can now reference Google Services when relevant. The idea is to make it faster and easier to bring information from these tools into your conversations without having to manually select them each time. Pro users globally get this this week, followed by plus team, enterprise and edu plans in the coming weeks, OpenAI noted, you can turn on Google connectors or other connectors from Settings, then connectors then connect on the application end quote and finally anthropic has updated Claudsonnet 4 to support a 1 million token context wind, letting it process prompts up to 750,000 words or 75,000 lines of code up to 5x on its old limits and more than double the 400,000 token context window GPT5 will give you. Quoting TechCrunch anthropic has built one of the largest enterprise businesses among AI model developers, largely by selling Claude to AI coding platforms such as Microsoft's GitHub, Copilot, Windsurf, and AnySphere's cursor. While Claude has become the model of choice among developers, GPT5 may threaten Anthropic's dominance with its competitive competitive pricing and strong coding performance. AnySphere CEO Michael Truell even helped OpenAI announce the launch of GPT5, which is now the default AI model for new users in cursor. Anthropic's product lead for the Claude platform, Brad Abrams, told TechCrunch in an interview that he expects AI coding platforms to get a lot of benefit from this update. When asked if GPT5 put a dent in Claude's API usage, Abrams downplayed the concern, saying he's really happy with the API business and the way it's been growing. Whereas OpenAI generates most of its revenue from consumer subscriptions to ChatGPT, Anthropic's business centers around selling AI models to enterprises through an API. That's made AI coding platforms a key customer for Anthropic, and could be why the company is throwing in some new perks to attract users in the face of GPT5, that global age verification on the Internet craze that is sweeping the world. Does it actually do anything? Well, according to SimilarWeb, yes, it can have an impact, apparently. UK traffic fell 47% for Pornhub, 47% for X videos and 39% for XHamster after age verification rules took effect. Quoting the FT media regulator Ofcom on July 25 began enforcing the new requirements for adult sites to check the age of all UK users under the Online Safety act, one of the world's toughest new regimes aimed at protecting children. On the Internet, users have, among other options, been asked to upload identity documents, enter credit card details, or scan their faces with a camera to prove they are over 18 traffic from British users to some of the world's most popular pornography websites has almost halved subsequently, with Pornhub losing more than 1 million visitors in just two weeks. Pornhub's average daily visits fell from 3.2 million in July to 2 million in the first nine days of August, while XHamster dropped from 1.7 million to 1.2 million month to month, Pornhub said. As we've seen in many jurisdictions around the world, there is often a drop in traffic for compliance sites and an increase in traffic for non compliant sites. The introduction of the UK's Age Verification Scheme coincided with a huge rise in British usage of virtual private networks services, which disguise a user's online location. Several VPN apps shot to the top of the UK's iPhone App Store charts as providers including Proton and Nord Security touted tenfold increases in usage. Anyone using a VPN in the UK would appear in similar web's data as if they were accessing a site from another country. It is unclear to what extent the sudden change in traffic patterns to pornhub and its rivals can be attributed to VPN usage. Their dramatic drop in visitors to adult sites was not mirrored in social networking sites such as Elon Musk's X and Reddit, which had relatively steady traffic numbers after introducing age checks last month, according to similarwe.