The Top Two Stories on Techmeme Right Now Are Lies ⇥ techmeme.com

The top two stories on Techmeme right now are lies. What I mean by that is not that the reporters are lying, but that the stories themselves are fundamentally dishonest because of who and what they are about. The first is by Katherine Blunt, of the Wall Street Journal:

Artificial-intelligence startup Perplexity on Tuesday offered to purchase Google’s Chrome browser for $34.5 billion as it works to challenge the tech giant’s web-search dominance.

Perplexity’s offer is significantly more than its own valuation, which is estimated at $18 billion. The company told The Wall Street Journal that several investors including large venture-capital funds had agreed to back the transaction in full.

Perplexity will not be buying Chrome. Someone there is very good at getting press, but this is ridiculous.

The second story is by Surbhi Misra, of Reuters:

Billionaire Elon Musk said on Monday his artificial intelligence startup xAI would take legal action against Apple, accusing the iPhone maker of breaching antitrust regulations in managing App Store rankings.

“Apple is behaving in a manner that makes it impossible for any AI company besides OpenAI to reach #1 in the App Store, which is an unequivocal antitrust violation. xAI will take immediate legal action,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X.

Not only was Musk’s claim debunked in a community note under his tweet, [Henry Chandonnet][hc] of Business Insider pointed out Grok topped the top free apps chart in February. Also, the day before Musk tweeted this, he retweeted someone who said Grok was the top app in the Netherlands.

The whole gimmick was revealed less than two hours later when Musk, quote-tweeting one of his drooling sycophants, started a campaign to increase its App Store popularity. I have no idea if it is working. It was not among the top free apps last Tuesday, but entered the chart on Wednesday; by Friday, it was number eight. On Sunday, it was number five. All of this happened pre-campaign. It has stayed in the number five slot probably in part because the App Store rankings are not immediate. Also, maybe ChatGPT is just really popular and well-known.

I cannot find a relevant lawsuit. I do think Apple should enforce its App Store rules since Grok is so unmoderated. This whole story is built on a foundation of lies to create what is effectively a viral marketing campaign for the permanently aggrieved.