Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on Disrupting Search with AI

You’re an intern at OpenAI, then Deep Mind, followed by Google…
Years later, you’re a Research Scientist at OpenAI, which you quit after a year to bet on yourself.
Cut to 2024.
You’ve built a $1B AI-based search company with investors like Nvidia, Daniel Gross, Jeff Bezos, & more.
That’s Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity.ai’s story.
In this episode of Product-Led AI, Aravind and I discuss a host of topics- Perplexity’s moat as the AI-powered "answer engine" that is disrupting search, how this could impact the ad-based business model of the sector, why startups have an edge on incumbents, and more.
You can read a transcript of our conversation and find more about the series at productledaipod.com/
0:00 - Introduction to AI applications
1:06 - Aravind's background and journey to founding Perplexity
2:38 - Evolution of Perplexity's concept and funding
4:08 - Transition from research to end-user product
5:30 - Solving the "hallucination" problem
7:45 - Creating a focused product on web search
10:33 - Summarization for faster answers
11:48 - Characteristics of Pro subscribers
13:00 - Potential paths for Perplexity's growth
15:10 - Data security concerns in workplace browsers
18:01 - Categorizing models as taker, shaper, maker
20:23 - The challenge of indexing the whole web
21:38 - Long-term commitment to indexing and crawling
24:01 - Importance of routing to appropriate models
25:24 - Ensuring new websites can become highly successful
27:10 - Future of citation economy and web monetization

[@batosato]

Oh come on. Perplexity is using OpenAI's API to query users search. How are they disrupting search with AI?? There are dozens of similar ideas floating on the internet.