Perplexity’s AI Browser Goes Free

Hello Readers👀 

Curious about the biggest AI moves today? You’re in the right place. In today’s edition, we have:

🔎 Perplexity Opens Comet AI Browser to All

🎬 How to Use Sora’s Remix Feature

📊 The AI Application Spending Report: Where Startup Dollars Flow

🔨Tools and Shifts you cannot miss

🔎 Perplexity Opens Comet AI Browser to All

Perplexity has made its AI-powered Comet browser free worldwide, ending its Max-only restriction. Alongside this, new premium tools like Comet Plus and a background assistant for Max users expand its ecosystem against Chrome, Arc’s Dia, and upcoming AI browsers.

The Shift:

1. Comet Browser Goes Free - Comet, previously limited to the $200/month Max plan, is now available to all users globally at no cost. The browser includes a built-in AI sidecar assistant for real-time Q&A, summarization, navigation, and project organization. Millions had joined the waitlist since its July launch.

2. Tools for Everyday Tasks - Free Comet includes Discover for personalized news, Spaces for project management, Shopping for price comparisons, Travel for itineraries, Finance for budgeting, and Sports for live updates. 

3. Premium Perks: Max and Pro Users  - Max subscribers get advanced models, an email assistant for drafting and scheduling, and early access to features. The biggest addition is a “background assistant,” described as “mission control,” that runs multiple tasks simultaneously across apps, notifying users when jobs like booking flights or drafting emails are complete.

4. Comet Plus Subscription - Perplexity is rolling out Comet Plus, a $5/month curated news service positioned as an Apple News alternative. It includes publishers like CNN, The Washington Post, Le Figaro, Le Monde, Condé Nast, and Fortune. Access is bundled into Pro and Max plans.

By making Comet free while layering premium services, Perplexity is setting up a two-tier model to pull users from dominant browsers. The background assistant and Comet Plus differentiate it from Chrome, Opera, and Arc, while showing how AI browsers may compete not only on search but also on productivity, content, and commerce.

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🎬 How to Use Sora’s Remix Feature

The latest Sora update lets you remix any existing video, swap characters, change settings, extend scenes, or even flip the whole vibe. For brands, that means faster creative iteration without starting from scratch.

Step-by-step for a DTC marketer:

1. Find inspiration → Pick a trending Sora creation or a campaign concept you want to adapt.
   

2. Start a remix → In Sora, load the original video and enable Remix Mode.
   

3. Swap or edit elements → Replace characters with your product, update the environment, or shift the mood (cinematic, playful, surreal).
   

4. Add branded context → Drop in new scenes like unboxing moments, lifestyle use, or a branded call-to-action.
   

5. Extend the story → Use Sora’s scene extender to add new chapters, creating multi-part ads or TikTok-ready serial content.

This turns one idea into a campaign engine, letting you scale assets across ads, socials, and landing pages in minutes.

👉 Try it here: Sora Remix

📊 The AI Application Spending Report: Where Startup Dollars Flow

AI spend data from 200,000+ Mercury customers (June–August 2025) reveals how startups are actually buying AI tools. The top 50 AI-native apps show which categories are scaling fastest, from creative suites to agentic employees. Unlike infrastructure spend, this ranking highlights application-layer adoption, where workflows and budgets are being transformed.

The Shift:

1. Horizontal Apps Take the Lead - 60% of spend went to horizontal tools used across roles. Leading players include OpenAI (#1), Anthropic (#2), Perplexity (#12), and Merlin (#30). Meeting assistants like Fyxer, Happyscribe, Otter AI, and Cluely also rank, alongside creative suites like Freepik (#4), ElevenLabs (#5), Canva, and Midjourney.

2. Vertical AI: Augmentors vs. Employees - Vertical apps (40% of the list) either supercharge human teams or replace them entirely. Popular verticals span customer service (Lorikeet, Ada), sales/GTM (Instantly, Clay), recruiting (Micro1, Metaview), and ops (Delve, Combinely).

3. Vibe Coding Becomes Enterprise-Grade - Four platforms, Replit (#3), Cursor, Lovable, and Emergent, made the list, showing vibe coding’s shift from consumer novelty to enterprise tool. Replit especially dominates, generating ~15x more revenue than Lovable.

4. Consumer Tools Move Upmarket - Nearly 70% of ranked apps began as consumer-first. Products like Midjourney (#28) and Cluely (#26) still earn the majority of revenue from individuals, but adoption is rapidly shifting toward enterprise teams. 

This report shows how AI adoption is reshaping spend: general-purpose assistants and creative tools are scaling fastest, vertical AI employees are emerging, and consumer apps are crossing into enterprise at unprecedented speed. For startups, this data signals where workflows, and future category leaders, are being built today.

🔨AI Tools for the Shift

🖼 AltTextLab – Generate high-quality, compliant alt text for images in seconds, accessible content that also ranks better, automatically.

👗 daisy | SSENSELESS – Absurdist luxury fashion collides with satirical AI for bold, unconventional style.

📝 illumi – A context-aware whiteboard that integrates ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and more to help teams collaborate more effectively.

✅ FirstSign AI– Validate your ideas fast with AI-powered user feedback and insights.

🗣 LingUp AI – Your personalized AI English-speaking partner that helps you practice and improve fluency.

🚀Quick Shifts

🎮 Elon Musk’s xAI is hiring a “video games tutor” to train Grok. The role involves labeling, annotating, and teaching game mechanics, stories, and design—aimed at making Grok “excel” at building games.

📲 OpenAI’s Sora app for AI video creation has rocketed to No. 3 on the U.S. App Store, hitting 56K day-one downloads and 164K in two days, despite being invite-only.

🚀 Anthropic has appointed former Stripe CTO Rahul Patil as its new CTO, replacing co-founder Sam McCandlish (now chief architect). Patil will oversee compute, infrastructure, and inference as Anthropic scales Claude.

🚨 Ex-OpenAI researcher Steven Adler exposes ChatGPT’s 21-day delusional spiral: 85% sycophancy, fake safety claims, missed safeguards, spotlighting urgent risks in how AI handles vulnerable users.

💰 OpenAI just became the world’s most valuable private company at a $500B valuation after a $6.6B employee stock sale, outpacing Meta’s AI push while fueling massive infrastructure and product ambitions

That’s all for today’s edition. See you tomorrow as we track down and get you all that matters in the daily AI Shift!

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