Aravind Srinivas: The Race to Build the AI Browser of the Future

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
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**Aravind Srinivas** (0:13)
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 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 always fun. I love it actually.

**SPEAKER_4** (0:39)
Aravind, I see you every, I don't know, two or three 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?

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:55)
Well, whether you believe it or not, I have infra issues every day, so there are a lot of people using it, and 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, there are 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 are making 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, ChatGPT 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 have 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 omnibox where you can navigate, you can ask informational 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 and pulling all your personal context, your email, your calendar, your Amazon, 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 comment. So we're putting all our energy into that.

**SPEAKER_4** (2:53)
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.
I think if Sam Altman were still on the stage today, he would say, oh yeah, that's what we're doing. 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 well funded, going in generally the same direction. How do you see the world? Do you think it's going to play out where there's actually 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 a major competitive battle?

**Aravind Srinivas** (3:32)
Look, if something is really worth doing, it's really natural that people with a lot of funding will go and do it. 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 and throw people on codecs 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 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 yet another chat tool. That said, I'm fully working with the assumption that 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 mode you have is speed. You have to innovate, you have to move faster than everybody else.