Aravind Srinivas - Building An Answer Engine

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:53)
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**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (2:22)
My guest today is Aravind Srinivas. He is the founder and CEO of Perplexity, a startup that he describes as an answer engine built from scratch with AI.
Has set out for Perplexity to become the most powerful answer engine backed by up-to-date sources. He helps me pick apart the technology, describing the behind the scenes of what it takes to build Perplexity to reach its potential and compete along the likes of Google and OpenAI. Our conversation goes deep into programming this kind of infrastructure, the competition around latency and constructing a business model around deep learning. There's so much on the horizon, so please enjoy my conversation with Aravind Srinivas.
I thought a fun place to begin would be a game I like to play with people, which is I call it the one minute bio. I'd love to hear the one minute summary of your life up until the founding of Perplexity, just to set the context for all that we'll talk about.

**Aravind Srinivas** (3:16)
Yeah, I grew up in India from a pretty humble background, was focused a lot on engineering and programming right from the beginning. Studied in one of the IITs, got really excited about AI because I happened to do a course on machine learning. DeepMind published their paper on training AIs to play Atari games. That got me to be resourceful. I got consumer gaming GPU cards from other people on my lab, traded my lab desk for them so that I could stay at the hostel and work on training these neural nets. And in general, when I look back, I've always realized I've been good at making deals, but traditionally you would consider me a nerd just excited about research and programming. My research there got me into Berkeley. I got to do more exciting AI research in Berkeley. That got noticed by institutions like OpenAI and DeepMind, which got me more exposure to the cutting edge.
And at DeepMind, I had a pretty crappy apartment when I was an intern. So I just mostly stayed in the office and I used to stumble upon books like How Google Works There. And in that, like I got really excited about entrepreneurship and that got me into thinking a lot of starting a company to work on a hard problem. Little did I realize I would literally go on to work on search itself, but that was fate laws irony sort of thing. Where the people who are excited about you taking on them.