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Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups.

I'm Kirsten Koresak, Transportation Editor, and we're doing things a little differently this week.

Perplexity, the AI search startup that hasn't even cracked 100 million monthly users,

just made a $34.5 billion with a capital B cash offer to

buy Chrome from Google. Reminder, perplexity has raised about 1.5 billion to date. The timing of this

rather bold offer may not be so random, though. The Department of Justice is days away from

deciding how to punish Google

after a judge ruled it illegally maintained its search monopoly. Today, we're going to resurface

a conversation between senior reporter Rebecca Boulon and Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the

Abundance Institute. The pair are going to help us unpack what's at stake

for Google in the search monopoly case, how its ad tech antitrust trial could go even further,

and how generative AI from startups like perplexity might change both search and advertising

as we know it.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of Star advertising as we know it.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch's flagship podcast about the business of startups. I'm Rebecca Boulon. Today, we're talking about all things Google, monopolies,

and AI with lawyer, computer scientists, and head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute,

Neil Chilson. Neil, welcome to the show. It's great to be here.

So give me a bit of a background about Abundance Institute and your personal work background

so we can see how that overlaps with what we're going to discuss today.

...