Perplexity chaos, GPT gets emotions & more (August 5, 2025)

Good morning!

Today we wake up to learn how Perplexity has been hiding from Cloudflare, Harvey is raking in the dough and GEO is the new craze, replacing SEO.

Let’s dive in👇

🍽️ Perplexity’s Big Week

🍷 Perplexity Partners with OpenTable

Perplexity just integrated OpenTable into its answer engine and Comet browser, letting users book restaurants via natural language queries. Ask it for a “romantic Italian spot nearby” and it’ll return real options — no app switch required.

🚫 Cloudflare Says Perplexity is Scraping Blocked Sites

Cloudflare claims that Perplexity is bypassing robots.txt and other anti-scraping signals, effectively ignoring websites that explicitly opt out. The move raises ethical concerns as AI companies fight for access to training data in a post-open-web world.

💼 Legal AI Startup Harvey Hits $100M ARR

Harvey, the legal co-pilot built on top of OpenAI models, has reached $100M in annual recurring revenue. Weekly active users have quadrupled, reflecting law firms’ accelerating shift to AI for contract review, research, and litigation prep.

🚀 Tools, Trends & A Bit of Chaos

🧠 Claude 4.1 Enters Testing Phase

Anthropic’s config files reveal internal testing of Claude Opus 4.1, likely with improved planning and reasoning. Red teaming is underway, suggesting release is near, possibly before GPT-5 drops.

🧵 Character.AI Launches AI Social Feed

Users can now post AI-generated chats, remix content, and engage in “character vs. character” battles inside Character.AI’s app, pushing the boundaries of synthetic social media.

🔍 From SEO to GEO

SEO is dying. Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) is taking its place, instead of ranking in search engines, brands now optimize to be cited by LLMs like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The internet is officially shifting.

🛠️ Tools of the Day

• Levio – AI transforms your raw talking head videos

• Substrata – Real-time insights into human dynamics for sales

• Pokecut – Create photos with prompts or clicks

• Korbit – AI code review that audits your pull requests

🎯 Prompt of the Day

⚡ Quick Hits

• ChatGPT now flags mental distress and offers wellness nudges

• Grok Imagine drops with NSFW-friendly video generation

• Kaggle Game Arena debuts, letting LLMs battle in games like chess and Go

• Alibaba’s Qwen-Image model solves “gibberish text” in image generation

📌 TLDR

Perplexity wants to book your dinner, and maybe your data. It now supports OpenTable, but is also under fire from Cloudflare for stealth scraping. Meanwhile, legal AI firm Harvey proves the sector’s real revenue potential with $100M ARR.

Catch you tomorrow,
David