How To Build The Future: Aravind Srinivas

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:00)
We released the ability to ask follow-up questions. That doubled our engagement time on the site, and also increased the number of questions every day. So I was like, okay, there's something here. It's not worth killing and pivoting to enterprise. It was not like I want to go and kill Google, like that sort of motivation. It was more like, what is an idea of that scale and ambition? It's something like this.

**David Lieb** (0:20)
Today, my view of Perplexity is a more intelligent Google search that's really useful in certain scenarios. What do you want me to think of it in three or four years?
Welcome back to another episode of How to Build the Future. Today, we're joined by Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, which in less than three years has grown to more than a $9 billion valuation. Thanks for joining us.

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:50)
Thank you for having me, David.

**David Lieb** (0:51)
How did you get into this world?

**Aravind Srinivas** (0:52)
I was pretty interested in AI, deep learning research. That's actually what got me into the US. I was an undergrad in India, came here to the US for doing my PhD here at Berkeley. Life really changed when I got to do an internship at OpenAI.
And Ilya Sudskiy was there. I still remember the day I first met him and I was very prepared and had all these fancy ideas that I thought were very interesting. And he listened for five minutes and said, all this research is useless. It feels really bad to hear that. So I got used to hearing the right things even if they're uncomfortable. And then he told me the only thing that matters is he drew two circles. One big circle, called it unsupervised learning. And then inside, he said reinforcement learning, another circle. And he said, this is AGI. Every other research doesn't matter. This was around the time when they were building GPT-1. They didn't even call it GPT-1. When I saw that research, I went back to Berkeley and said, hey, I was working a lot on RL. That was the rage at the time because of AlphaGo and DeepMind. But that was kind of like chasing the trend. So I went back to my professor and said, hey, we have to actually go and study unsupervised and generative models and generative AI. So then I got into that and did more internships at Google. During my Google internship, I stumbled upon this book called In The Plex. So I would launch jobs during the day, training runs, and then go and read these books in the library because interns don't have any other thing to do. And it would feel amazing that, oh, like these guys actually were once upon a time, grad students like me. And now I'm working as an intern in their offices reading the book about them. It feels nice. It would be amazing to start a company like that in future where there's a lot of research. There's a lot of like AI. At the same time, it's very grounded in product building. It's very difficult to do that. And I spent a lot of time thinking about it. I even spoke to Ilya Sutskevich about it, like where we said, there are probably only two problems where you can work on AI and also build product at the same time. One is like search and the other is sub-driving car. Because all your product rollouts are becoming data points for improving the underlying AI in the product. And that will make the product even better. And that will lead to more users and more usage will lead to more data points and it will become a flywheel.
And it should also be on the AI completeness path. It's sort of a buzzword to say this, but basically what it means is better AI should keep making your products better. So that way you can keep working on your company until AI is solved. And once it's solved, okay, sure, we'll worry about all those implications.

**David Lieb** (3:37)
But your company gets better as AI gets better.

**Aravind Srinivas** (3:39)
Exactly.

**David Lieb** (3:39)
As opposed to your company gets run over by somebody else.

**Aravind Srinivas** (3:42)
Exactly. So search is like one of those problems.

**David Lieb** (3:44)
So you're at this moment where you kind of have this realization that you want to start a company. How did you get the kind of activation energy to quit your great job at OpenAI and go do that? How did you find your co-founders?

**Aravind Srinivas** (3:56)
I came across this blog that one of the former YC partners, Daniel Gross wrote, but it was like how to build the next Google. And I think basically the core idea is like you could do so much more with better query reformulation. So you take a query and you just add some suffixes. So if someone's looking for reviews of a movie, just suffix site colon rottentomatoes.com. If someone's looking for reviews of some new gadget, do site colon that corresponding subreddit. You can get away with a lot of these suffixes and like our special strings to like filter results and already make Google so much better, even with the existing Google ranking.