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Apply at y combinator.com/apply.
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the video.
You have to innovate. You have to move
faster than everybody else. And it's
like running a marathon but at an
extremely high velocity. Right. The only
uh mode you have is speed. I read all
the Twitter comments every time. Google
IO last year was AI overview and
perplexity is dead. This year was AI
mode and perplexity is dead and I read
all of that too and it's it's always
fun. I love it actually.
[Music]
Aravant, I see you every I don't know 2
or 3 months and you give me an update on
the latest on Perplexity. Why don't you
just tell these folks where you're at?
How are things going? Do people use
Perplexity?
Do you guys use Perplexity?
Well, whether you believe it or not,
like I have infra issues every day. So
there are a lot of people using it and
um this usage is actually growing to the
extent that we don't actually know how
to deal with it. We have to rebuild the
infra to scale the next 10x. So
definitely a lot of people in the world
using it. Thanks to all of you as well.
What is next for us? The browser. That's
the big bet we're making as as far as
the future of the company goes.
Everyone's here is like why should I use
perplexity when there's search and other
AI apps of course chat GPT has a bigger
distribution than us every other AI app
is trying to put search as a layer in it
all of them support citations a lot of
them support some of the verticals we
put work into yes like we're always
going to continue to remain better than
others in that category but I think the
browser and agents are truly the next
bet that we want to make we think about
it as an assistant rather than a
complete autonomous agent but one omni
box where you can navigate you can
askformational queries and you can give
agentic tasks and your AI with you on
your new tab page on your site car as an
assistant on any web page you are makes
the browser feel like more like a
cognitive operating system rather than
just yet another browser and we hope to
make it like a cloud where you launch
several tasks in parallel that are
running asynchronously Okay. And pulling
all your personal contacts, your email,
your calendar, your Amazon, your, you
know, all all sorts of social media
accounts that you have and you go and do
research on real estate, the markets,
and these are all like just processes
running on your browser. That's never
been possible before. And Chrome was
exciting when each tab was its own
process. You think about each query or
each prompt could be that
and that will be our new browser comet.
So, we're putting all our energy into
that.
This was going to be the hard question I
saved for the end, but since you queued
it up, I'll do it right now. Um, I think
if Sam Alman were still on the stage
today, he would say, "Oh, yeah, that's
what we're doing." Um, and I think
Sundar at Google probably would say
that's the direction we're headed as
well. So, it feels like there are a
bunch of players now, many of them very
wellunded, going in generally the same
direction. How do you see the world?
Like do you think that there's going to
it's going to play out where there's
actually like a bunch of different use
cases and you can own a very important
one that others won't want to own or are
we in for like a major competitive
battle?
Look, if something is really worth
doing, it's it's only natural that
people with a lot of funding will go and
do it. Um people said perplexity is a
great product. Now everyone is trying to
do something that can answer any
question with sources. Cursor was a
great product.
Now, OpenAI is trying to buy cursor's
competitor anthropic launch codeex uh
like clot code. Google has its own like
rival tool. So, it's only natural that
when there's a lot of money to be made
in a certain sector, people are going to
try to copy it. And there's only a
limited amount of things you can be
world class at, whether it's being
building great models or building one or
two really good products. So, you're
obviously not going to win on
everything. For us, this is the only
thing we care about. accuracy at the
level of answers, accuracy at the level
of tasks, orchestrating all these
different tools. The browser is much
harder to copy than like uh yet another
chat tool. That said, I'm I'm fully
working with the assumption that uh
OpenAI will also build its own browser.
Anthropic will also try to build its own
browser. Google already has one called
Chrome. So, it's completely reasonable
to expect them to do it. And the only uh
mode you have is speed. You have to
innovate. You have to move faster than
everybody else. And it's like running a
marathon but at an extremely high
velocity, right?
Yes. Yeah. I I really agree with your
statement that like you can only focus
on one thing and be world class at one
thing. And just to give you guys like a
little glimpse into it, we were
backstage before this talk and he was
showing me some of the new stuff that
they're working on and there was like a
bug, right? And he stopped everything he
was doing to like figure out what was
wrong with this bug. Why was it not
doing the right thing? And if you think
about like what would the CEO of a large
company do in that situation? Probably
they would like hand it off to somebody
else on their team. So that's like a
good piece of evidence that you actually
mean what you say.
Yeah. I I I love I love triaging and
fixing bugs. I know it sounds trivial.
Like is that the best use of the time of
a CEO? There are a lot of people who
would think otherwise. Recently people
are like uh oh like like there I hope
this behavior is rubbing off on others.
Like I've noticed even Sundar is doing
bug support on X right now. So
I'm happy that like you know that that's
setting a good example.
Great. Okay, let's go back to the
beginning. Like most of the folks in the
audience here are either students or
recent grads or grad students. Um and I
think hearing your story of like how you
started Perplexity uh would be really
interesting to them because it's
probably exactly the world that they're
in now.
Yeah.
Tell us how you got started. We started
the company without actually having
clear idea of what to build which is the
opposite of what YC advises which is
start from a project and turn it into a
company. I really think at this point in
time when AI is improving so fast you
don't have to rigidly stick to any one
idea when you're getting started but the
most important thing is you don't change
the idea every week like that you
shouldn't do either. So start with
something like brainstorm, think about
it and then try to immediately build it
and get it in the hands of people. Uh
one tool that we were building was
natural language SQL which we actually
thought about it as a search tool
searching over relational databases. I
allowed Twitter search but it never like
like the original version of Facebook
graph search. I allowed that when I was
much younger. So I wanted to like
rebuild that but using language models.
Um, and I love Twitter as a platform.
So, it was there's no good way to search
over Twitter. There still is no good way
to search over Twitter. But at least at
the time, we organized the entire
Twitter's data in the form of like
relational tables and just converted
every user's query into a SQL query and
ran it as against the database and it
was really really good and um that's
what got us started. But at some point
we figured it's better to like scale
this across the web and we cannot make
every website in the form of tables and
neither is it actually easy to answer
all sorts of questions. So we bet on the
fact that language models can do all the
reasoning and parsing and like
structuring later but the more important
thing is to start with something more
unstructured and that ended up becoming
perplexity.
Got it. Um, and maybe one step before
you actually left to go start the
company, like how did you find your
co-founders? How did you decide that
machine learning and AI was like the
area you wanted to focus on?
Cuz that was the only thing I was good
at. I was not good at anything else.
Okay.
So, what's the point in starting a
company? I cannot start a delivery
company or a social media company. Like,
I'm not I'm not the right fit, right?
Uh, the only thing I knew was AI and
machine learning. In fact, it's funny. I
we started an AI company. uh but we're
not made fun of like not even training
our own models like mo but only the
foundation models are stuff we don't
train we train so many different models
but uh that's the extent to which you
need to have the intellectual humility
to know like what you're good at what is
actually doable for you within with the
resources that you have access to and
the co-founders are like people I like
like I knew from grad school so we had
been talking and discussing ideas for a
long time and um I think grad school is
a great way to like uh you know like
like identify your co-founders. You
don't talk to them with the you know
with the long-term calculation of like
oh this could be my co-founder of my
future company. You talk to them because
they're interesting people. And I think
that's essentially the value of the Y
cominator network. So even if your first
startup year fails, you get access to a
lot of amazing people and maybe they
could be your future co-founders. So
that that's essentially what grad school
was for me.
Yeah, that's awesome. Um, okay. So, you
launched this first version of
Perplexity, which is largely to like do
Twitter search effectively. Um,
at what point did it like start to work
and you maybe internally felt like, oh,
we should keep working on this. This is
going to be something to explore.
Yeah. So, whoever we gave early access
to, they were all very excited about it.
They kept using it repeatedly. I think
there's a phenomenon in products where
there's an initial wow factor. Yep.
And then mostly either drops completely
that that means you never had real
retention or it it definitely drops but
there sustained usage. So when we saw
that for the relational database
searches like Twitter, LinkedIn, GitHub,
we knew that we have like there was
something magical about combining large
language models in search. But then what
we did is like we dreamt bigger and said
what if we just give answers and site
the relevant sources. We launched that
as a discord bot and that was also
continually being used. It was not like
a one-day usage and people started
ignoring it. So that's when we decided
we had the courage to launch it. We
launched it 7 days after the chat GPT
launch especially at a time when chat
GPT did not have web right web search.
So that was a good moment. And I think
like many of the successful AI products
that people speak about today cursor
included all were like 2022 launches or
like like early 2023 or late 2022
launches. So they're all like old
people, you know, in the in the in the
in this AI time scale.
Yes.
For me, the aha moment was like the New
Year Eve, there was like close to
700,000 queries. And I was like, okay,
this has the crappiest name for a
consumer product. It's called
Perplexity. Very hard. Nobody even knows
how to share it. And then it was so
slow. Took seven seconds to answer for a
query at the time. And um it was making
a lot of mistakes, hallucinations
and like a no-name company, no-name
founder, very one or two million dollars
in seed funding. Despite that, people
were caring enough to sharing
screenshots and like and and a new year
eve and you could be, you know, watching
Netflix, right? So, uh that's when I
knew there was something real here and I
started like optimizing for like, you
know, committing to this this vision.
Okay. And at that point, like on that
New Year's Eve, did you in your head
think I'm building a thing that could
really compete with Google and like take
over a market as big as what Google
offers or was it just a toy for you?
The first time the thought occurred to
me was when um Google wrote a blog post.
Sundar wrote a blog post about Bard.
Like that was around the time when we
were raising series A funding and
everybody said, "Okay, Bard is going to
do whatever you're doing." And it's like
why do I have to build bar like why not
just do it on Google right where you you
have all the distribution in the world
so why do you have to build a separate
product like just just update your core
main
the best possible asset to do this
exactly and I kept thinking it was
pretty obvious you cannot like if if if
people can get answers to best hotels to
stay in San Francisco with a view of the
Golden Gate Bridge or like Bay Bridge or
like where can I stay in New York like
next to the Central park with good
amenities or like which flight is the
best thing for me to take to fly from SF
to London. If you get direct answers to
these questions with booking links right
there, how are you going to mint money
from booking and Expedia and Kayak and
like like you know or like same same
thing for shopping. How are you going to
take money from um Amazon and like
Walmart for the same ad where they're
all bidding against each other? It's not
in their incentive to give you good
answers at all. So that's when I
realized that they have to build a
separate product but they can never
capitalize on their core distribution
and 2024 2023 especially and a large
part of 2024 too Google had like maybe
the fourth or fifth best models at any
moment. So as a startup outside Google,
you had access to AI that was better
than what Google internally had, which
was unprecedented, right? Until then, if
you had to compete with Google and you
had to build something that needed a lot
of AI in it, good luck, right? Like cuz
you never have an AI outside Google
that's even equal, leave alone being
better. But now it's a completely
reversal of the situation thanks to open
AI or anthropic or open source models.
So that plus innovator dilemma plus the
fact that we could make a lot of
mistakes and it's fine. Whereas for
Google, one mistake tanks their stock.
Like you remember the live demo of Bard
where it failed and the stock went down
6%.
Yep.
So we knew that there was a lot of
advantages for us.
Yeah. And I heard you talk about this
recently but you know Google
specifically has been trying to build
perplexity like experiences and you know
you
AI mode.
Yeah. They just like change the name of
it each Google IO and then not really
true. I'm not I'm not I'm not like
saying something wrong.
Yes.
Right. So it's like I I
look it might sound a little um cocky to
say that but it's true. Um the same
feature is being launched year after
year after year
with a different name with a different
VP with a different group of people but
it's the same thing except maybe it's
getting better but it's never getting
launched to everybody. One of the things
I I've come to admire about you is you
really have a focus on the user
experience and and you told me how you
kind of learned that from Larry Page.
Yeah. By reading the book about uh
Google. Um why do you think Google has
lost that ability?
Well, it's a much bigger business,
right? And it's not founder anymore. Uh
it's hard to take risks. Um I think they
have great people. Nobody like no one in
this audience would think Google has
incompetent people. I think they're like
really great engineers. It's largely the
incentive structure. It's hard to like
you know take a hit on your own stock
and do the thing that's long-term
correct. So you know honestly I'm happy
that that sort of dilemma exists because
otherwise where is the opening for
startups right and and then if startups
can succeed then it's going to be
monopolies getting bigger and bigger and
that's not great for the world. I
actually am very happy that we are able
to win and they're also like able to
like ship new products and people are
like first time comparing right earlier
for access to information you would
never even bother to compare an
alternative to Google.
It's true.
Like that was like considered a waste of
time a joke. Now at least you're like oh
I first go ask this app like I I'll ask
Google or I'll ask Chad GPT or I'll ask
Perplexity or ask Gemini and then maybe
you don't even ask Google anymore. You
just ask the AI apps and there are a
bunch of AI assistants and the phone
makers will start offering all of them
as alternatives. It's not going to be
like a locked in default search option.
So, I'm really happy that they're
competing in a world where a monopoly
hopefully doesn't exist and that creates
a more fair ground for everybody.
Yeah. Yeah. You were also telling me
backstage about um you know you are
facing this increased competition from a
variety of folks but if you look at your
numbers you haven't really seen effect
you know I read all the Twitter comments
every time the Google IO exactly the
same set of comments repeated this year
u Google IO last year was AI overview
and perplexity is dead this year was AI
mode and perplexity is dead and I read
all of that too and it's it's always fun
I love it actually um because like like
they know that they're all thinking like
I don't I don't even expect these things
or the people in the company are like
thinking Google wouldn't build this or
something like that but it's the reality
is like nobody actually gets exposed to
those features but competition is real
okay let's assume let's let's
accept that open AI is extremely
wellunded doesn't have all these
innovative DMA problems wants to
actually ship search on chat GPT chat
GPT is the most successful consumer AI
product out there And so competing
against it is very difficult which is
why I I really want to like um push the
company more on the browser side and I
think comet the browser will be an
abstraction layer above chat bots. I you
could even imagine like I you know if
you permit comet all your chat GPT chats
can you know be fed into that AI and
like you don't even have to worry about
memory or personalization or like you
know any of these things and it'll do a
thing a lot of new things that a chatbot
cannot do like accessing other tabs
accessing your browsing history going
and completing forms for you like paying
your credit cards buying stuff for you
um and being your scout you know going
and doing all the research for to that
sort of thing like periodic recurring
tasks. I think that's the magic that the
browser enables for you. And putting it
into like mobile like like building
mobile versions of this browser is going
to be very hard like just engineering
wise it's going to take many months. So
I'm not really worried about like
someone else trying to copy this. It's
going to take time for anybody.
Switching to a different browser is like
a pretty big decision for a user. What
what do you think will be the very
shortterm things that your browser will
do? so much better than what I can get
today in Chrome that will make me want
to switch.
The perfect blend of AI, navigation, and
agents is is is what we're going to
offer. And um might sound like a boring
answer, but no one's done that. And
there are like hundreds of millions,
probably close to a billion people using
AI these days. So, the market's already
pretty big.
What's like a specific example of how I
would do that, you know, if I had access
to it tomorrow?
You can schedule your meetings. uh you
can reply to some of your emails that
you don't even want to read. You can
like for example let's say you're
hosting a Y cominator event and you say
I only want to accept Stanford dropouts
and it can go through the entire list of
people who applied and just filter based
on who's you know took scrape their
LinkedIn URLs
filter based on whether they were
Stanford and whether they dropped out or
not and then accepted like that level of
multi-step reasoning
is something you can uniquely do. By the
way, I'm not saying that's a good
filter. Uh I wouldn't get in otherwise.
And so hopefully you don't you're more
open. Yeah.
We look for deep mind researchers also.
Yeah. Yeah. Don't worry. Um Okay, cool.
Let's talk a little bit about how you
run the company now, right? I don't know
if you wanted to say how many employees
you have.
Yeah, we have about 200.
Okay, so the company's getting bigger.
Um you now have access to code writing
AI tools. Um, are you guys just like
full in on that stuff? Are you vibe
coding everything? How what what's it
look like?
I mean, you you don't want to wipe code
everything, right? Like like like we
frequently run into infra issues and you
don't want a wipe coder right there
fixing it on live things on production
like I do want like people well trained
in regular software engineering,
infrastructure, distributed systems like
you don't want to like replace these
skills. But yeah front-end design that's
where we are seeing tremendous adoption
like cursor is being used by everybody.
uh we made it mandatory to use at least
one AI coding tool and internally at
perplexity it happens to be cursor and
like a mix mix of cursor and github
copilot but yeah we definitely made it
compulsory and so the way machine
learning people are do using it AI
people are like sometimes they read a
paper and they can just upload a
screenshot of the pseudo code and uh ask
cursor to like just edit the files to
implement this new algorithm and then
it's able to like uh write it on unit
tests and then uh run an experiment
pretty quickly that uh is reducing the
experimentation time from like 3 4 days
to like literally 1 hour or like there
are people who don't know design and so
sometimes I'm I just give them feedback
where I take a screenshot of my iOS app
and I say this button needs to move here
with an arrow and they upload my
screenshot to cursor and then ask it to
like write write a change to the swift
UI file. So that level of change is
incredible. Like like the speed at which
you can fix bugs and ship to production
is is crazy.
The more bugs there are as long as you
can fix them fast.
Yeah, bugs are always ahead of like how
fast people can write code though.
But just just to be clear, I'm a big fan
of all these tools, but it is also
introducing new bugs and many people
don't know how to fix them
and they don't even know how the bug got
introduced and they have to go find it
again. So it's not perfect and I
actually like the more newer tools like
clawed code seems to be far smarter than
like what cursor is able to do. So I'm
actually like like really positive that
this is the right future but there are
there are issues right now.
Yeah.
Yeah. um in talking to a lot of the
folks here, one of the major questions
that I've heard is um as these coding
tools get better and better and better,
what is the like actual
enduring value of a company like yours
if if increasingly it's easy to
replicate what you have done using these
tools? What's your take on that general
type of question?
I mean brand definitely has a big value,
right? Like there are cursor
competitors, perplexity competitors like
OpenAI will have like their own cursor.
OpenAI has perplexity within chat GPT
that did not kill any of these
companies. So there is a certain brand
value that once you acquire at the scale
of like several millions of users,
paying users, you don't actually die
that fast. You earn the right to survive
and keep building. Uh so brand is
important. uh narrative is very
important to the brand like you have to
communicate to people why do you even
need to exist for us it's the focus on
accuracy okay let there exist 100 chat
bots but we are the most focused on
getting as many answers right as
possible we focus on speed time to first
token on app or web like we're still the
fastest despite doing search uh we focus
a lot on like how we present the answer
so there are some things you are
obsessed about because you care about it
and that becomes your narrative and your
brand identity. And if you manage to get
reasonable amount of distribution, not
saying 100 million users, but tens of
millions, then you earn the right to
keep playing the game no matter what
other people ship. Until then, it's
definitely a challenge. You have to
worry about it. Even now, we worry about
it and the only solution is to move fast
and keep shipping. be beyond brand like
do you think about any network effect
types of things emerging with perplexity
I mean brand has network effects right
like people people tell each other about
the brand
but no AI product has within app network
effect like like it's not like WhatsApp
where if you build a WhatsApp rival meta
has a definitely like a questionable
brand right like people don't
necessarily trust Meta's products they
think like these are ad products Despite
that, nobody's able to switch off
WhatsApp that easily because all your
contacts, your groups, everything is
there. AI doesn't quite have that yet.
Uh mainly because you can easily export
your chat GPT history, upload it
somewhere else or uh things like that. I
think the browser will definitely be one
play to like you know figure this out
because as your browsing history and
like which again you can still export
but not the same as just getting a dump
a CSV dump
uh and your passwords your wallet your
agent remembers you there's a lot of
tasks that are running on the browser
that you rely on your day-to-day life
and work that's one way to like keep get
the product a lot more sticky and like
create more network effects especially
if multiple people rely on the same set
of tasks you're sharing it with them.
That's one way to get all this into like
the next level.
It also sounds like a lot of the stuff
that you aspire to solve for users
requires integrations or partnerships or
something with a bunch of other
companies in the world. Yeah. And if you
can get those to be good, then there is
somewhat of a network effect in the
sense that your product will be good and
some competitor would have to build the
same integration or same deal with with
these providers.
What does that look like do you think in
the future? like does perplexity do
deals with all the airlines in the world
and all the hotels and all the
e-commerce providers?
So we we already work with self book uh
they power all the hotel bookings
natively done on perplexity. We work
with trip advisor to surface all the
reviews of hotels and different you know
places. We have like collaborations for
the maps. We work with Yelp. uh we also
like you know for shopping we have a lot
of merchants who are directly selling on
us
uh and then we work with firmly to like
support the bookings like like native
purchases so there's already a lot of
partnerships Shopify is one of our
partners on finance we work with FMP
sports we work with like uh stats
perform so there's a lot of data
providers already working with us to on
these verticals and we just think it's
going to expand further as agents start
to do things. Different people are okay
with like becoming MCP servers. Some
people are not. Some people just want to
like like preserve their websites. The
browser agent will be generic enough
that it'll respect whatever the third
party wants because at the end of the
day, the agent is the one that's being
permitted by the user to act on their
behalf. And um if there is no MCP
server, it's still fine. You can just
use these tabs as if the user would have
done it. And uh that's the key advantage
of the browser that you do not have if
you commit entirely to just the MCP
vision. If you commit entirely to MCP
vision, you require these third party
MCP servers to work reliably. Uh the
data that they send you uh on with the
MCP protocol has to be perfect. Your
chatbot has to like like you know deal
with all these issues that exist. On the
other hand, if you just ground up design
it as the way a human would use that
website, you have full control over like
how to how to do it, you don't have to
rely on someone else doing the
engineering well on their end.
Um, let's talk next about business
model. Your main competitor Google,
their business model, as you've talked
about, is selling ads. Um, and you think
that prevents them from being really
good at what you're doing. So what what
will your business model be and how will
you get it to be on the order of
magnitude of of Google's?
I don't know if you'll ever get order of
magnitude profits as Google. Uh just to
be clear and I don't think that's
needed. No one in the history even
Google themselves never has had another
business that had the margins that
Google has. So it's completely
reasonable to get something far far
better than any public company out there
right now and and way be still way below
Google. Number two, I think the
subscription revenue is like really
encouraging. We never expected to get
this far and then we think like we can
grow at least, you know, a few billions
a year in just subs, which is a great
business. usage based pricing where
people are paying an agent for
completing a task or people have
recurring tasks and they pay based on
you know every single use of the task
and they normalize this system based on
like how much it would take to hire a
person to do that for them uh is going
to be a thing I don't exactly know how
it's going to play out what are the
margins going to be on that potentially
it's going to be way better than um
subscriptions in terms of volume of
people who would pay for it but it might
be lower margins because it's usage
based. So you're still going to be
spending on all those queries. Someone
might be paying a subscription to like
one of these AI apps and might not have
used it for an entire month. And so
that's good margins on that user, right?
So I don't actually have a clear sense
of how this is all going to like evolve.
But all I know is subscriptions and
usage based pricing are going to be a
thing. transactions, you know, uh if
people start buying more through AIS,
uh taking a cut out of the transactions
is good. It's going to be CPAs have
historically been way lower margins than
CPCs, which is why Google never became a
transaction platform, which is why I
said like you're going to make a lot of
money here. You may never make as much
money as Google.
Yeah. I Google Google's business model
is potentially the best business model
ever. Ever. So, yeah, it's fair to not.
Maybe it was so good that you needed AI
to kill it basically.
All right, let's we're going to do some
audience Q&A in a little bit, but um
before we get there, I kind of wanted to
understand your advice for the folks in
this room, right? Like if you were in
their position back whatever it was four
years ago, what would you advise they
do?
I would say uh work incredibly hard.
There is no substitute for it. Don't
think like you're very smart like like
strategizing the right way to build a
company despite all like what big model
labs are doing. You should assume that
if you have a big hit, if your company
is something that can make revenue on
the scale of hundreds of millions of
dollars or potentially billions of
dollars, you should always assume that a
model company will copy it. Mainly
because they are really looking for
revenue. They raise like tens of
billions or close to 50 billion and they
need to justify all that capex spend and
they need to keep searching for new ways
to make money. So they will copy
anything that's good. I think you got to
live with that fear. You have to embrace
it and realize that like your mode comes
from moving fast and building your own
identity around what you're doing
because users at the end care. Like when
you're trying to get like a specific
person for your house help, you are
searching for that specific person. and
you're not like going for a general
agency that handles all of it. So, um I
think there's like like real benefit
from embracing that fear and like
sleeping with that fear and waking up
every day and like feeling excited about
what you're going to build because
that's the only thing that'll keep you
going.
Well, you guys are the perfect example
of how it's possible to go up against
somebody as big as Google. That's great.
All right, let's do some Q&A. We'll
start on the left side here. Go for it.
Uh, hi, my name is Sammy and I just want
to personally thank you for helping me
get a 100 in my theory of knowledge
course. Uh, would not have been able to
do it without you. No shame. Um, quick
question for you. Uh, you know, with
your recent partnership with Nvidia to
ship AI models across Europe, um,
there's been talks about perplexity
being installed on um, all Samsung
phones or pre-installed. Um, and that
could lift your valuation towards 14
billion uh, according to sources like
Bloomberg. Um it's a heavy
responsibility being the default search
engine for you know the mainstream
population. What do you think are the
most important factors at Perplexity to
prevent hallucinations or incorrect uh
data from you know being given to the
masses? Thank you so much.
Thank you. Uh hallucinations is
something we we really care about. We
we're building benchmarks internally uh
to keep up to date with that. The only
way there is to keep building a better
search index. uh keep capturing better
snippets of all the web pages and then
like these models like like you know are
getting fast enough that you can have
them reason multistep for every query
without incurring too much cost and so
that's another way to reduce
hallucinations.
I I want to ask you about like the
innovator's dilemma. So, if you were in
Sund's shoes or in um in like the Google
co-founder's shoes, like what would you
do and how would you kind of come up
with maybe changing their business model
even if it's a worse model?
So, if you were running Google competing
against yourself, what would you do?
I I think I don't envy that job at all.
Um I I nobody in the world wants that
job. It's it's it's a very difficult
job. Would you sacrifice the business
model in order to get like a new
get the next product
or would you ship it as a separate
product? Like if you're Google, would
you just build a separate thing that is
the perplexity competitor and and
sacrifice the distribution advantage
that you have in the short run?
Yeah, I I don't like genuinely I don't
know. I think uh I can say all what I
want but they have more data on like
what their users are doing and um there
are a lot of people in the world who
hate AI by the way so I think just
throwing AI down people's throats on
such a you know massive distribution
area is not easy what I would do I would
I definitely don't know and I I don't
want to be in that position also by the
way if if if ads are part of every AI
answer you're going to hate it too um
and and so um it's good that There
there's alternatives like us.
All right.
Hey Arvin, my name is Akshad. Uh so in a
recent interview with Nikl Kamat, he
asked you for an internship at
Perplexity. So I was just wondering how
that um arrangement is going.
He he came he came to the office. He
spent a couple of days. I mean he hasn't
posted about it. So I'll let him post
about it. But I we did spend time with
him. Uh it was not a proper internship
but we did speak to him for a while.
I want to start by saying thank you very
much for your very candid answers. I
really appreciated that. So um a lot of
startups they find some like cool
application of foundation models and
then they'll like build something off of
that but then if it does gain traction
then the foundation models will
consolidate that into their own
infrastructure. And Perplexity sort of
has that issue too with like a lot of
LMS adding search like TAGBT,
Gemini, companies like Coher. So I was
just wondering like how would you
approach something like that? Would you
try to pivot just get better at what you
do or I think I would say uh pick
something you want to like be known for?
Uh yes there are other people
integrating search but we still want to
be the fastest and most accurate and
obviously I cannot just say that and and
then stop like we need to figure out a
new strategy too and and build new
products that don't exist yet. Uh so our
browser will be that bet for us and
browser and search are not two
distinctive products. They're actually
like the browser is a natural graduation
step from search just like how Google
graduated from Google search to Chrome
and Chrome is the main reason they got
billions of daily queries from hundreds
of millions. So when Google IPOed they
had no browser and they had like maybe a
100 million queries now you know like
it's like 10 billion or something. So
the browser is an important part of that
and then so that's why we we are making
a massive bet on that and agents can
only be built with a browser. I'm very
like convinced about that vision that if
you want to have a mobile agent that you
can actually build and implement without
being restricted by whatever OS rules
that Apple or Google sets in terms of
not being able to call third party apps.
Expecting every mobile app to have MCP
servers and then like connecting all
their data to your thing is not going to
be that straightforward. Like nobody
wants to be disintermediated by an AI
that quickly. So the browser will be a
great way to build all these things.
Thank you.
So as a lot of us here have done um
we've tried we've failed at our startups
um you know some of us have been more
successful than others some like me have
failed when you're in that moment
failing over and over again. What do you
tell yourself as CEO or as an
entrepreneur to to win to teach yourself
to win?
What what do I tell myself when I feel
like I might fail?
Yeah. or when you're in that very
specific moment of failing where you
feel like everything's crashing down on
you or this feature isn't working or
this bug has popped up, how do you get
through that and what do you think your
biggest motivational factor is in that
realm?
Or maybe like at the beginning before it
started to take off, what gave you the
hope to keep working on it versus just
go back to OpenAI and get your job?
I just watched uh the Elon Musk videos
on YouTube.
No, I'm serious.
[Applause]
I I can tell you which video. There's a
video where there's like a third failure
in a row and like what do you think? And
he's like I don't ever give up. I would
have to be dead or incapacitated.
So you'd say you're also never going to
give up?
Yeah, I I hope to I hope to like stay
that way. It's not easy. Uh I think he's
done it for way longer and that's why
you all like respect him. But that's you
know there are examples of great
entrepreneurs who have done this despite
all the odds stacked against them. So
what do you have to lose? Just keep
going.
Thank you.
Yeah.
[Applause]
Uh yeah my question is about uh kind of
the sustainability of perpetuity not in
terms of the business model but just in
terms of the web in general. Um, you
know, a lot of studies have come out
recently showing that AI search engines
like Perplexity drive a lot less traffic
to websites. So, I'm curious, what do
you think like the web will look like in
5 to 10 years when a lot of these
websites, you know, they're not getting
as much traffic and so they have to kind
of cease their operations and like the
web will just be a lot quieter of a
place for content creation. How do you
think perplexity fits into that? And
what do you think the web will look like
in that era?
I think that there are going to be uh,
you know, the web is already pretty long
tail uh, and there's a massive power
loss. So I I feel like the parallel is
going to get even more skewed. That is
very obvious. There are going to be
certain brands that are wellnown and
they're going to preserve direct organic
visits, but those who are trying to game
the SEO system and trying to get
traffic, I think they're definitely
going to have a harder time.
Okay. Yeah.
Hi Rean, good afternoon. Uh firstly,
where do you place the line between
summarization and plagiarism in report
generation? And how do you avoid IP
violations in your product? And
secondly, how do you deal with political
bias? Bias and political sorry,
political bias and personal interest in
news articles and other human written
sources.
Yeah, I think there are cases where you
actually have objective truth, right?
Like what was the score in the NBA game?
what is the live weather right now in
San Francisco where you don't want to
you don't want to be wrong ever on those
queries and and people know what is true
but you even there you're trusting right
like you're trusting some data provider
who's tracking the live game the TV
that's showing you the number or Apple
or Google's like acute weather all these
things so at some point it all relies on
trust and trust is built over time based
on being being accurate reliably and so
trying to surface the right data from
the right people who have earned the
right to like like be surface in AI is
is how we think about it for accuracy.
Now there are things that don't have one
clear accurate answer. I think there
the best thing we can do is offer all
the perspectives
and not really take a clear opinion on
like what is right and wrong when
there's no clear uh answer to that
question. Do you measure how accurate
you are at that job by user feedback in
some way?
We don't actually measure it today. We
we should an eval set uh should be built
for that like like questions where there
is no one objective answer. The problem
with building an automated eval for for
that type of thing is what what what is
the right answer? It's subjective,
right? like like if if there are
questions about the origins of CO and
there's so many different opinions of
that relying a lot on Wikipedia as a
source and and you know can say maybe
for a human raider you're like okay
saying all the things Wikipedia said
it's a good answer but maybe what you
want is to say stuff that is not there
in Wikipedia and that relies on like
having a much better human evaluators
like pool much smarter people who who
are supposed to rate these things and
they're not like available for like you
scale AI style evaluations. Right.
Right.
Okay. I think we have time for one final
question. You get it?
Awesome. Hi, my name is Angela. Thank
you so much for talking to us. I have a
question about your go to market
strategy. You had a great campaign for
students. That's how I and assume many
college students learn about you guys.
But then also you had a collaboration
with Koshi which is a little bit
different audience. So I'm just trying
to understand how do you decide which
audience you're trying to get? I think
like what one one perspective here is
trying to get into distributions of
users that you don't typically have
access to on your traditional marketing
channels. You know, there are a lot of
people who don't use Twitter or LinkedIn
and and and and they're all like they
all exist in the world. We just are
living in a bubble here. U and and there
are some other businesses that have good
access to them. uh like you know
traditional businesses like like you
could imagine the the kind of people who
use Costco regularly may not even be
using AI on a regular basis and so if
that's the kind of people you're going
for then it makes sense to change your
strategy to reach them but also remember
that uh it's good to grow with
adjacencies like you do want to have
some overlapping sets of people who
would be the word of mouth carriers as
they help you expand to more you know
non-over overlappinging circles. So I
think that that's how I think about it.
Like there should be some overlap, but
your distribution should keep evolving
over time. Thank you.
All right, Arvin, thanks for joining us.
Thank you everybody.
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