There is so much capital floating around in the artificial intelligence sphere currently that even a cash-poor firm like Perplexity can secure enough investment to splurge on Chrome. Reuters reports that the all-cash offer is funded by various venture funds, but Perplexity has not offered specifics.

At best, Perplexity's reputation among major AI players isn't exactly exemplary. Cloudflare recently claimed, just as a for instance, that Perplexity is guilty of using " stealth, undeclared crawlers to evade website no-crawl directives ." Other major media outlets including Forbes have accused Perplexity of stealing content, too.

In an unlikely bid that shows the growing brashness of young artificial intelligence companies, the A.I. start-up Perplexity has made an unsolicited offer to buy Google’s Chrome web browser for $34.5 billion.