Perplexity kills student incentives, moving past peak Nvidia, the Google Empire strikes back

Welcome back to Zero Shot, where Brady, Praveen, and Rohin offer their perspectives on the latest developments in artificial intelligence.This week, Praveen describes how Perplexity aborted its Campus Partner Programme in India after allegations of fraud surfaced. In a bid to drum up usage for its Comet browser, Perplexity had rolled out a referral-for-pay system, enticing students to convince others to download the AI browser… except they may have been legions of bots. If living, breathing people can’t be convinced to use Comet, then what does that say about it as a product?Rohin dived into the successes of Nvidia, which is the most successful “shovel seller” among companies in the AI sector. Advanced sales of its Blackwell and Rubin chips over the next 14 months, for instance, have reached $500 billion. But given how Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) are now able to train state-of-the-art language models, the lustre around Nvidia’s graphics processing units (GPUs) has faded just a bit.Finally, Brady unpacks the rollout of Gemini 3 by Google, which has compelled even OpenAI’s Sam Altman to pause and acknowledge that it’s a threat to everyone else. Gemini 3 excels at visual tasks, and it’s part of the architecture that makes Google’s new integrated development environment Antigravity stand out. Not only does Google have this advanced language model, but also the trust of enterprise and retail users—setting it apart from other companies such as OpenAI. Zero Shot’s cover art is generated using AI. Everything else is made by humans.If you have fresh ideas, critiques, or suggestions, we’d love to hear from you. Drop us a note at [email protected], or just write to us to say hi.Additional Reading‘It’s hell for us here’: Mumbai families suffer as data centres keep the city hooked on coalhttps://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/24/mumbai-datacentres-coal-air-pollution ‘AI eats the world’, November 2025https://www.ben-evans.com/presentations Insurers retreat from AI cover as risk of multibillion-dollar claims mountshttps://www.ft.com/content/abfe9741-f438-4ed6-a673-075ec177dc62 ‘Perplexity cancels Campus Partner Programme in India after widespread fraud’https://www.theleftshift.com/perplexity-cancels-campus-partner-programme-in-india-after-widespread-fraud/ ‘Earn thousands as a Campus Partner’ of Perplexityhttps://x.com/sherlock_ux/status/1980849775382786069?s=20 ‘Perplexity has cancelled its Campus Partner Programme in India following allegations of fraud tied to its referral system’https://x.com/arsh_goyal/status/1985255590038524346?s=20 The algorithm that detected a $610 billion fraud: How machine intelligence exposed the AI industry’s circular financing schemehttps://substack.com/home/post/p-179453867 Nvidia’s ‘I’m not Enron’ memo has people asking a lot of questions already answered by that memohttps://www.theverge.com/business/828047/nvidia-enron-conspiracy-accounting ‘Made by humans’, Perplexity says the quiet part out loud, AI in courtroomshttps://the-ken.com/podcasts/zero-shot/made-by-humans-perplexity-says-the-quiet-part-out-loud-ai-in-courtrooms/ ChatGPT Go's free year turns Indian markets into its biggest test bedhttps://www.business-standard.com/companies/news/chatgpt-go-s-free-year-turns-indian-markets-into-its-biggest-test-bed-125112401042_1.html “Attention is all you need”https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 Altman Memo Forecasts ‘Rough Vibes’ Due to Resurgent Googlehttps://www.theinformation.com/articles/openai-ceo-braces-possible-economic-headwinds-catching-resurgent-google