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Lyrics & Translation

[English]

YC's next batch is now taking

applications. Got a startup in you?

Apply at y combinator.com/apply.

It's never too early and filling out the

app will level up your idea. Now, on to

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.

Key Vocabulary

Vocabulary	Meanings
innovate /ˈɪnəveɪt/ C1	verb - to introduce new methods, ideas, or products
move /muːv/ A2	verb - to change position or go from one place to another verb - to progress or advance
faster /ˈfæstər/ A2	adjective - moving or operating at a greater speed
build /bɪld/ A2	verb - to construct or develop something
company /ˈkʌmpəni/ A2	noun - a business organization
search /sɜːrtʃ/ B1	verb - to look for information noun - the act of looking for something
speed /spiːd/ B1	noun - the rate at which something moves or operates
scale /skeɪl/ B2	verb - to increase in size or extent noun - the size or extent of something
accuracy /ˈækjərəsi/ C1	noun - the quality of being correct and precise
browser /ˈbraʊzər/ B2	noun - a software application for accessing websites
launch /lɔːntʃ/ B1	verb - to start or introduce something new
growth /ɡroʊθ/ B2	noun - the process of increasing in size or amount
task /tæsk/ A2	noun - a piece of work to be done
assistant /əˈsɪstənt/ B1	noun - a person or device that helps
model /ˈmɒdəl/ B2	noun - a system or representation used for prediction
competitor /kəmˈpetɪtər/ B2	noun - a person or company that competes with another
answer /ˈænsər/ A1	noun - a response to a question
user /ˈjuːzər/ B1	noun - a person who uses a product or service
infrastructure /ˈɪnfrəstrʌktʃər/ C1	noun - the basic facilities and systems serving a country or organization