Hard Numbers: Search wars, Lumen lights up, Anduril gets a raise, Public-private partnership

250 million: Perplexity, the AI search engine, says it’s answered 250 million user questions in the past month alone. That’s half of the 500 million it answered in all of 2023. Surging popularity for the service comes as OpenAI readies its forthcoming SearchGPT product and as Google lost a major antitrust case over its dominance in search.

500: Lumen Technologies is watching its stock surge thanks to AI. The US telecom company revealed its fiber optics infrastructure is in demand by data centers needed for the AI boom. The company’s stock jumped 500% in the past month, when it was hovering around $1 per share.

14 billion: Palmer Luckey’s defense tech company, Anduril, just raised $1.5 billion in a new funding round, valuing the company at $14 billion. Luckey, best known as the founder of Oculus VR, which he sold to Meta in 2014, started Anduril in 2017 to make drones and other autonomous aircraft, and it is seen as one of the major AI companies challenging the legacy defense contractors.

100,000: The state of California has struck a partnership with Nvidia to train 100,000 students in AI-related skills. The initiative focuses on community colleges and will feature new curriculums, certifications, workshops, and labs to get students ready for careers in AI — including those with the state government.