AI search engine Perplexity is in fundraising talks and hopes to raise around $500 million at a valuation of $8 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal..

If the deal goes through on these terms, Perplexity’s valuation might be greater than double what it was at its $3 billion valuation obtained from SoftBank over the summer. According to WSJ, the corporate currently receives about 15 million inquiries a day and generates about $50 million in annual revenue.

Perplexity uses artificial intelligence to help people search the Internet using a chatbot-style interface. Some news publishers have accused the corporate of unauthorized web crawling and plagiarism, and The New York Times even sent Perplexity a cease-and-desist letter, but CEO Aravind Srinivas said he wants to work with publishers and has “no interest in being anyone’s business here.” antagonist.”

Fundraising talks began after OpenAI announced it had raised a $6.6 billion round at a $157 billion valuation. While products like OpenAI’s ChatGPT have blurred the road between chatbot and search engine, the corporate is moving more directly into search with SearchGPT.

Perplexity didn’t immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Drone manufacturer DJI filed a criticism lawsuit Friday against the US Department of Defense over its inclusion DoD list “Chinese military companies”.

A DJI spokesman said the company filed the lawsuit after “attempting to contact the Department of Defense for over sixteen months” and decided it had “no alternative but to seek relief from federal court.”

“DJI is not owned or controlled by the Chinese military, and the Department of Defense itself acknowledges that DJI produces consumer and commercial drones, not military drones,” the spokesman said.

The Chinese company was included on the Department of Defense’s 2022 list, following similar actions by other government agencies – in 2020 DJI was included on the list Department of Commerce Entity List this essentially prevented American corporations from selling it, and the following yr it was placed on the Treasury Department’s investment block list because of DJI’s alleged involvement in surveillance of Uyghur Muslims. (The company said it had “nothing to do with the treatment of Uyghurs in Xinjiang”).

In its lawsuit, DJI claims that as a result of the listing, it “suffered ongoing financial and reputational harm, including loss of business, and employees were stigmatized and harassed.”

The company says the Department of Defense report justifying the listing “contains a scattered set of claims that are completely inadequate to justify the designation of DJI.”

The lawsuit argues: “Among numerous deficiencies, the report applies improper legal standards, confuses individuals with common Chinese surnames, and relies on outdated facts and weakened ties that fail to establish that DJI is a (Chinese military company).” It also says that founder and CEO Frank Wang and three early-stage investors “collectively own 99% of the company’s voting rights and approximately 87.4% of its stock.”

The Department of Defense didn’t immediately reply to TechCrunch’s request for comment.

Mira Murati, CTO of OpenAI, who announced her departure last month, is raising VC funds for a new AI startup, in accordance with Reuters.

According to reports, this startup will deal with constructing AI products based by itself models and will raise over $100 million on this round.

After her departure, Murati wrote in X that in its recent releases, OpenAI “has fundamentally changed the way AI systems learn and reason through complex problems.” She said: “I’m leaving because I want to create time and space for my own exploration,” but didn’t provide details of her plans.

Before joining OpenAI as vice chairman of applied artificial intelligence and partnerships in 2018, Murati worked at Tesla and Leap Motion. She was promoted to CTO in 2022, and was even named interim CEO through the transient ouster of co-founder and CEO Sam Altman.

Murati is considered one of several OpenAI executives who’ve recently left; OpenAI’s director of research and vice chairman of research announced their departures a few hours afterward. Per week later, OpenAI announced that it had raised $6.6 billion in the most important VC round of all time.