Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas has shared how the company’s Comet browser plans to take on competition from Google’s Project Mariner. Notably, Project Mariner is currently available only to Google’s paying customers and brings many of the AI functionalities offered by new-generation generative AI browsers.
Asked about the competition between Google and Perplexity during a Reddit AMA, Srinivas said, “They have something called Project Mariner (behind a $250/mo plan, I believe) – similar but quite limited compared to the capabilities of Comet.”
“I expect them to pay close attention and copy/adopt stuff,” he added.
Srinivas confirmed that Comet is built on Chromium and expressed that he is “grateful” to Google for keeping it open-source. However, he criticised the company for being too bureaucratic and disjointed.
“It’s a giant bureaucratic organisation right now with too many decision-makers and disjointed teams, and they have business model constraints on letting agents do the clicks and work for you while continuing to charge advertisers enormous money to keep bidding for clicks and conversions. At some point, they need to embrace one path and suffer, in order to come out stronger, rather than hedging and playing both ways,” Srinivas said.
Perplexity launched the Comet browser earlier this month, and it is currently available only to paying users, while free users are being given access gradually via invites.
Srinivas was also asked about when Perplexity plans to launch iOS and Android versions of the Comet browser. While he remained non-committal about the exact timeline for Android, he stated that iPhone users could see the new browser in the next two to three months.
When asked if Comet will be available to free users, Srinivas said, “Comet will be accessible for free users definitely. But the agentic search and personal/memory searches might be either rate-limited or exclusive to Pro/Max users. We haven’t made any decisions yet. We need to first understand what’s the spend per user in the initial cohort.”
