Perplexity

The Ads Business Model Will Die & Lessons from Working with Elon at Twitter | Parag Agrawal

Sep 26, 2026 · 1:08:55

Parag Agrawal, former Twitter CEO and founder of Parallel ($230M from Sequoia, Khosla and First Round), argues agents will use the web 1,000x more than humans, requiring entirely new search technology and business models. He explains why agent search differs — inputs, outputs, latency and cost tradeoffs — claiming the same quality at 1/20th to 1/50th the compute, with Turbo for voice agents and Advanced for background agents. Because ads don't work with agents, Parallel is building an 'AdSense for agents' that pays content owners per agent use; he argues search prices must collapse from $10 to $1 per 1,000 queries, with another 10x coming. He also covers data licensing at inference time, the Monitor API shifting the web from pull to push, and the urgency he saw in Elon Musk.

Anthropic's $30T Assumption & OpenAI Confirms IPO | Why Customer Service & Robotics are Overinflated

Aug 27, 2026 · 1:26:44

Jason Lemkin, Rory O’Driscoll and Harry Stebbings say the AI boom now depends on Nvidia and hyperscalers financing frontier models, as shown by Nvidia's $6B Poolside purchase and $1B at a $12B pre-money valuation. They dissect OpenAI's promised 2027 IPO, arguing it has no choice as Anthropic outraces it and 'it's all about code'; they call Anthropic's $30T TAM claim delusional and OpenAI's $200 plan a losing consumer business. Also covered: Mercor's $20B round, Hugging Face's $13B sale risk, Citadel unwinding 80% of Leopold's fund, Stripe's 41% growth, agents' data leaks, and why customer support, humanoid robotics and AI services are the dumbest categories. Their verdict: we're less than a third of the way through the cycle and addicted to tokens.