San Francisco startup Perplexity has raised $73.6 million in Series B funding from investors including Nvidia, Google executives, and Jeff Bezos.

Perplexity's 'answer engine' platform uses generative AI to provide instant answers with source citations, challenging Google's web search dominance.

Despite its promising technology, Perplexity faces concerns surrounding the cost of running AI models and issues of copyright and misinformation.

The funding will be used for customer adoption and global expansion, anticipating the generative AI sector's expected value of $667 billion by 2030.

Google is reacting to Perplexity's success by rushing to rebuild its search product, indicating a potential shift in the future of web search towards generative AI.