#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet

**Lex Fridman** (0:00)
The following is a conversation with Arvind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans get answers to questions on the internet. It combines search and large language models, LLMs, in a way that produces answers where every part of the answer has a citation to human created sources on the web. This significantly reduces LLM hallucinations and makes it much easier and more reliable to use for research. And general curiosity driven late night rabbit hole explorations that I often engage in. I highly recommend you try it out. Aravind was previously a PhD student at Berkeley, where we long ago first met, and an AI researcher at DeepMind, Google, and finally OpenAI as a research scientist. This conversation has a lot of fascinating technical details on state of the art in machine learning and general innovation in retrieval augmented generation, aka RAG, chain of thought reasoning, indexing the web, UX design, and much more. And now a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast. We got Cloaked for cyber privacy, ShipStation for shipping stuff, NetSuite for business stuff, LMNT for hydration, Shopify for e-commerce, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team while it was hiring, or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfreedman.com/contact.
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**Aravind Srinivas** (1:57)
Maybe you will too.

**Lex Fridman** (1:59)
This episode is brought to you by Cloaked, a platform that lets you generate a new email address and phone number every time you sign up for a new website, allowing your actual email and phone number to remain secret from said website. It's one of those things that I always thought should exist. There should be that layer, easy to use layer between you and the websites. Because the desire, the drug of many websites to sell your email to others and thereby create a storm, a waterfall of spam in your mailbox is just too delicious. It's too tempting. So there should be that layer. And of course, adding an extra layer in your interactional websites has to be done well because you don't want it to be too much friction. It shouldn't be hard work. Like any password manager basically knows this. It should be seamless, almost like it's not there. It should be very natural. And Cloaked is also essentially a password manager, but with that extra feature of a privacy superpower, if you will, go to cloaked.com/lex to get 14 days free or for a limited time, use code LexPod when signing up to get 25% off an annual cloaked plan. This episode is also brought to you by ShipStation, a shipping software designed to save you time and money on e-commerce order fulfillment. I think their main sort of target audience is business owners, medium scale, large scale, business owners, because they're really good and make it super easy to ship a lot of stuff. For me, I've used it as integration in Shopify, where I can easily send merch with ShipStation. They got a nice dashboard, nice interface. I would love to get a high resolution visualization of all the shipping that's happening in the world on a second by second basis. To see that compared to the barter system from many, many, many centuries, millennia ago, where people had to directly trade with each other. This, what we have now is a result of money, the system of money that contains value, and we use that money to get whatever we want. And then there is the delivery of whatever we want into our hands in an efficient, cost effective way. The entire network of human civilization alive. It's beautiful to watch. Anyway, go to shipstation.com/lex and use code Lex to sign up for your free 60 day trial. That's shipstation.com/lex. This episode is also brought to you by NetSuite, an all in one cloud business management system. It's an ERP system, enterprise resource planning, that takes care of all the messiness of running a business. The machine within the machine. And actually this conversation with Aravind, will discuss a lot about the machine. The machine within the machine and the humans that make up the machine. The humans that enable the creative force behind the thing that eventually can bring happiness to people by creating products they can love. And he has been, to me personally, a voice of support and an inspiration to build, to go out there and start a company, to join a company. At the end of the day, I also just love the pure puzzle-solving aspect of building. And I do hope to do that one day, and perhaps one day soon. Anyway, but there are complexities to running a company as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's what NetSuite helps out with. They help 37,000 companies who have upgraded to NetSuite by Oracle. Take advantage of NetSuite's flexible financing plan on netsuite.com/lex. That's netsuite.com/lex.