Simplification Takes Courage & Perplexity introduces Comet

My name is Philipp and you are reading Creativerly, the internet corner where I unpack my musings, curate and write about noteworthy apps and software, and explore the latest trends in design and tech.

Hey and welcome to Creativerly 315 👋

I kept this newsletter a bit shorter than usual, since I freshly started a new job recently, and that meant getting a lot of inputs, reading a lot of onboarding documents, and getting up to speed to contribute as soon as possible. I am excited about this fresh start, although since I am an introvert, there is also always some kind of anxiety involved, as I just need some time to settle and adapt to new working environments. However, it has been a very welcome, which I deeply appreciate, so I am excited about the time and projects ahead.

As my main focus now quickly shifted from working mostly on side-projects to again contributing full-time to a design and product team, I haven't had time to focus on Creativerly as much as usually did, throughout the past week. I still managed to put together a quick newsletter packed with news and insightful articles.

Enjoy, and see you next time.

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Fresh Updates & News

Perplexity is working on a browser called 'Comet' to reinvent how we interact with the web →

Perplexity announced with a flashy one-pager containing just a waitlist signup field, that it is working an AI-powered browser called Comet. Those news are relevant, as over the course of the past year, Perplexity has been making waves on one hand because its search engine that became increasingly popular, and on the other hand because several reports found out that Perplexity had been dodging paywalls of news sites, and ignoring the robots.txt code that explicitly asks web crawlers to not scrape a page. As the CEO, Aravind Srinivas, got confronted with that, he missed his chance to explain why Perplexity did that, and just pointed to others.

Perplexity has been at the forefront of shattering the foundations of trust that built the internet, and now they decided to build the piece of software that gives users access to the internet.

Elicit raises $22M to deploy AI to radically increase good reasoning in the world →

Elicit raised a $22M Series A at a $100M evaluation, led by Spark Capital and Footwoork, while existing investors also participated. Elicit is a company that puts AI to great use, as it uses language models to extract data from and summarize research papers, and its platform now serves more than 400,000 researchers every month, who are using Elicit to analyze research papers and synthesize their findings.

This is Elicit's second round, as they raised a $9M seed round in September 2023. Back then, they served 200,000 researchers, and now grew to over 400,000. With the new round of funding, Elicit is planning to expand beyond academic research, as they want to take the transparency and systematicity they have applied to automated literature review and apply it broadly to become the standard for evidence-based AI-native decision-making.

Mental Wealth

❯ Why I Like Designing in the Browser – “It can be surprising for new clients to see just how much of our design process happens in HTML, CSS and (light) JavaScript. While we do plenty of ideation exercises, sketching, wireframes, mockups and more, we like to get our hands dirty in the browser as soon as we can.”

❯ Simplification Takes Courage – “No interface operates in isolation. Everything we make, however contained we may think it is, actually has porous, paper-thin walls between it and the vast digital ecosystem around it. Those walls may be enough to keep our information contained, but they do nothing to prevent the constant bleeding and blending of attention from anyone we hope will look at it. Our interfaces, no matter how well-designed, receive just a tiny portion of the attention that anyone has to give anything.”

❯ Developing Taste – “When the first car came out, consumers didn't care about its color, or silhouette, because the competition was a horse.1 But now that cars have been commoditized, quality and details have become more important than ever.”

❯ Consistency means nothing – “Words create a false sense of agreement. My line of work relies on many words loaded with meaning, but lacking concrete definition. Words like quality, craft and simplicity. These are abstract words. And in the abstract, people generally agree on their meaning. But definitions stray wildly once those abstract concepts get specific and real.”

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Appendix

❯ ICYMI

In my newest post for Creativerly, I wrote down my thoughts on why online writing often loses its personal touch in favor of polished prose, and why crafting engaging content that feels relatable and memorable – without sacrificing your unique perspective, matters most. Check out ‚Approach writing in public as conversation instead of a performance‘.

❯ Quick Bits

• Inside the Telegram Groups Doxing Women for Their Facebook Posts (Anna Wolfe, Sarah Cammarata / WIRED)
• Apple promises $500 billion in US investment in wake of tariff threats (Ashley Belanger / Ars Technica)
• Microsoft launches native Mac app for Copilot (Anna Washenko / Engadget)
• What to Do With Your Defunct Humane Ai Pin (Julian Chokkattu / WIRED)
• Palantir CEO’s new book says Silicon Valley has ‘lost its way’ (Anthony Ha / TechCrunch)
• Grok blocked results saying Musk and Trump ‘spread misinformation’ (Wes Davis / The Verge)
• IBM likes Hashicorp, finally puts a $6.4B ring on it (Paul Kunert / The Register)
• Skype will take its final curtain (and video) call May 5 (Sarah Fielding / Engadget)
• Automattic-owned Beeper is releasing redesigned desktop and iOS apps (Ivan Mehta / TechCrunch)
• ‘I’m selling the Nazi mobile’: Tesla owners offload cars after Musk’s fascist-style salutes (Dara Kerr / The Guardian)
• German defence ministry asks startup to build hypersonic spaceplane (Siôn Geschwindt / The Next Web)
• Mozilla flamed by Firefox fans after promises to not sell their data go up in smoke (Liam Proven, Thomas Claburn / The Register)
• AI killing some companies, others doing fine (Rob Beschizza / Boing Boing)
• What it's like to use Apple Intelligence with multiple languages (Filipe Espósito / 9to5mac)
• Stocks drop again as tech tumbles (Luke Kawa / Sherwood News)

Till next time! 👋‌‌‌‌

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