"Does Hamas still exist militarily? Yes. Is it organized? No. The path to completely dismantling them goes on." This was the view of a senior Israeli military official in March, yet Israel has "failed to destroy Hamas as a military and political force," Beverley Milton-Edwards, the co-author of a forthcoming book on the Islamist group, said at The Times. 

What did the commentators say? 
At the time of Hamas' surprise assault on October 7 last year, Israel put Hamas' military strength at between 30,000 and 40,000 fighters. The Israeli army has been "amazed every day by how strong Hamas is" in the face of intense air strikes and ground operations by the Israeli Defence Force, said military analyst Yoav Zitun in Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth. "It is a real army that was established 50 minutes from Tel Aviv over the past years," with a stockpile of "hundreds of thousands of weapons," including advanced rocket launchers, explosive drones, machine guns and Kalashnikov rifles, supported by advanced communication systems and supplied by a network of tunnels spread across Gaza. 

By spring of this year, following months of bombardment by air, land and sea, insiders and regional experts painted a "grim" overall picture for Hamas, the Financial Times said in March. But estimates of the group's strength are "notoriously difficult." Israeli intelligence assessments indicate that at least 18 of its 24 battalions have been "dismantled as organized fighting forces." Half its fighters, including several top field commanders, are believed to have been killed, leaving behind "small guerrilla cells, emerging to fire rocket-propelled grenades or place explosive devices," said the Financial Times. The majority of fighters are now believed to be hiding in and around the southern city of Rafah ahead of a planned assault by Israeli forces. 

What next? 
Whatever its numbers, U.S. intelligence analysts foresee Hamas being able to continue a "lingering armed resistance for years to come," using its extensive underground tunnel network to "hide, regain strength and surprise Israeli forces." And what constitutes victory for both sides remains wildly different. "Let's assume that all of Gaza lies in ruins and someone will stand there left from Hamas, a wounded soldier, and will raise a Hamas flag — they've won the war," said Micha Kobi, a retired former senior official in Israel's Shin Bet security agency. "That's what they believe."

Launching a search engine business has always been a "nearly impossible hill to climb" because contenders are "up against" the "Mt. Everest" that is Google, said Digiday. But new startup Perplexity AI aims to reach that peak by using artificial intelligence to offer answers to questions rather than simply links. 

What's the product? 
Recently valued at $1 billion, Perplexity AI is the creation of Aravind Srinivas. After interning at OpenAI and Google's DeepMind, both of which became leaders in generative artificial intelligence, Srinivas co-founded his challenger tool, which provides fast Wikipedia-like responses to search queries. So it's "bye-bye" to the "10 blue links" of Google, said The Verge, and "hello, direct answers to all my weird questions about the world." By "gleaning answers from a variety of large language models, both closed and open-source," Perplexity AI can "take advantage of each model's analytical strengths," as well as the "varying pricing structures" to "improve performance and lower costs," said The Economist. 

What do the experts say? 
Srinivas has "openly thrown down the gauntlet to Google," said The Economist. "Upstarts are supposed to win over underserved customers with cheap, scrappy technology," but Perplexity, with a subscription model that may eventually include ads, "can be more expensive than Google, and its answers tend to be far more polished (if not always accurate)." 

It's impressive, but the "thing you have to understand about a search engine is that a search engine is many things," said The Verge. People use Google to "find important and hard-to-access scientific information" but also "find their email inbox," shop websites or "remember who was president before Hoover." 

The "real question in front of all these would-be Google killers" is "not how well they can find information" but rather "how well they can do everything Google does," said The Verge. Although the 10 blue links of Google "isn't the answer for search," neither is an "all-purpose text box." "Search is everything, and everything is search," so "it's going to take a lot more than a chatbot to kill Google."