Dmitry Shevelenko on Perplexity's Vision for Reshaping the Internet

SPEAKER_2 (0:02)

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio, News.

Joe Weisenthal (0:18)

Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal.

Tracy Alloway (0:22)

And I'm Tracy Alloway.

Joe Weisenthal (0:23)

Today, you are going to be listening or watching a special episode of our podcast recorded live at a conference, which you've probably never seen before.

Tracy Alloway (0:33)

Yeah, this was at the Lazard Foursquare conference, and we interviewed Dmitry Shevelenko. He is the Chief Business Officer of Perplexity, which is something you might have used before. We certainly use it.

Joe Weisenthal (0:44)

Yep, one of the leading AI models. And so this is a conference related to media and deal making. And so we talked about what the impact of AI is going to be on news, media and brands, the Internet as we know it.

Tracy Alloway (0:56)

We also took questions from the audience. So you will hear us referring to questions that we are receiving on the app. We hope you enjoy it. Take a listen. All right. So here's my first question. Should we even be talking to you? What I mean by that is I could just go on Perplexity and ask all these questions, and it'll give me a pretty decent answer. What's the point?

Dmitry Shevelenko (1:18)

So first of all, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. I love that tee up, and you guys were scheming backstage of what's going to be the hard opening question. But I love it because the thing that humans will always be uniquely exceptional at is asking questions. So Perplexity may have the answer, but Perplexity does not have an innate desire to be curious. And that's what you guys have, and that's why journalism is so important, and that's why having these conversations is important. It's about the questions, not necessarily the answers.

Joe Weisenthal (1:58)

Kind of related to this, I guess, but here's the thing that I always think about, which is I enjoy using Perplexity, et cetera. Let's say you have great relationships with all the news publishers, et cetera, and they're really cool with it all, and all those deals get solved, et cetera. Like, why do we need the Internet as we know it, that has things called websites built for humans? Now that we're in this age where we can go to a chatbot or something like it, and the answer is right there. Do we need to have what are traditionally called websites anymore? Why would a publisher continue to invest in design and all of these things when I could just get the answer from Perplexity or ChatGPT or whatever else?

Dmitry Shevelenko (2:41)

So again, it goes back to, I think the reason we're drawn to media properties is because of the questions the journalists and editors are asking, right? It's not necessarily, it's the framing. It is the what is actually worth asking about, what's worth reading about. Perplexity doesn't have answers to that. You have to come to Perplexity already armed with a question, and oftentimes people read news and there's something they didn't understand fully, and they come to Perplexity to get that deeper understanding. But the spark, that comes from editorial judgment, that comes from the intuition of a world-class reporter, and that's why we're excited through programs like Comet Plus to find new business models for that.

Tracy Alloway (3:28)

How do you actually judge editorial judgment or quality of news sources? Because I can imagine a future where a lot of our news consumption is through something like a perplexity model, which means that you're basically the arbiter of what information is reliable. So how do you make those decisions?

Dmitry Shevelenko (3:45)

It's not me at the wheel. Ultimately, this is where we focus a big part of our technology. It's building accurate AI. The thing that we believe is going to be most scarce in the future is not intelligence, it's trust.

I think the bedrock of trust is transparency. That's why Perplexity pioneered showing you exactly which source the information is coming from and empowering users to apply their own judgment of whether that is a good source or not so good source. But we deploy many different algorithmic strategies. Oftentimes, if many publications are saying the same thing, that's a strong signal that they're on to something. And the outliers, you're kind of more sensitive to. But this isn't, it's not a simple problem. And this is why we raise a lot of capital and hire the world's best technologists to build accurate AI.

Joe Weisenthal (4:44)

So I think anyone could sort of intuitively understand why publishers might be anxious about Perplexity as being a destination. Evidently, it's not just news publishers. Literally, since we got on stage three minutes ago, news broke that Amazon demands Perplexity to stop AI from making purchases. Literally, it just broke three minutes ago from Bloomberg. What is the...