Perplexity CEO on NVIDIA and Who Wins the AI Race

Aravind Srinivas (0:00)

A lot of people here in this conference said we were the most likely company to fail.

Eric Newcomer (0:03)

Okay, let's address that. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It was this time a year ago where there was a vote, and they said, it wasn't to fail, and they said they wanted to short you guys.

Aravind Srinivas (0:10)

Isn't it the same thing?

Eric Newcomer (0:11)

I suppose, yeah.

Aravind Srinivas (0:12)

Yeah. Well, here I am, sitting here still, and we're doing better than most companies ever were performing.

Eric Newcomer (0:17)

People would have lost money on that trade.

Aravind Srinivas (0:20)

Yeah, and I would bet the same this year. If you guys short us, you're gonna lose more money next year.

Eric Newcomer (0:24)

We've obviously heard from a lot of people today, such a seismic event.

Aravind, I want to just bring up the tweet that you put out a couple of hours ago, basically after Jensen announced that he had resigned, because you're someone who obviously, they're an investor in Perplexity, but you're someone who also has dealt with him a lot from business side and I think are quite close to him. So the tweet that you put out, thank you Jensen Huang for 33 years of bold leadership. You built a small startup into America's most valuable company with relentless improvement. Your grit and perseverance should always be remembered. Your personal generosity with time and advice to founders like me, has secured a bright future for America and AI. Can you give us a sense as to what you're thinking today and what's, I imagine, a chaotic and unusual day in the world of AI?

Aravind Srinivas (1:16)

Yeah. So Perplexity and Nvidia have been working together for many years now.

Eric Newcomer (1:21)

Are they one of your largest investors?

Aravind Srinivas (1:23)

They're one of our largest investors, yes.

And it's one of the greatest technology companies in the history of America, and we're, you know, everybody here is using Nvidia Compute, Nvidia GPUs, Nvidia Libraries. And, you know, before any of this controversy, like, there's no doubt about the history of innovation that the company has done. And Jensen is one of the greatest founders ever, right? And part of that is his relentless grit, determination, constantly looking to build a next thing, not being satisfied with where he is. And those are all great traits for any founder to make it. And just like me, I'm sure every founder here wants to build a trillion-dollar company. And he's done it from, you know, having a breakfast or lunch with his co-founders at Denny's to actually, like, building the world's most valuable company. That's the sort of story that everybody gets inspired by. And, like, I feel like, in amidst all this noise, we should remember to, you know, take the right lesson of, like, what relentlessness, grit, determination, and long-term thinking can actually help us build.

Eric Newcomer (2:35)

Yeah. I mean, can you talk more specifically about you guys and what Jensen was able to kind of bring to Perplexity to build you guys to where you are today?

Aravind Srinivas (2:43)

So we collaborated with them a lot of inference libraries, you know, starting from TensorRT and then Nvidia Dynamo. A lot of our inference engineers have collaborated with inference engineers and Nvidia open-sourced a lot of things together.

Obviously, like, we've been helped working with them on the Nemotron as part of their coalition program with a few other labs. And Nemotron 35V0, we contributed a lot of, like, mid-training data to that. And we're going to continue collaborating with them on Nemotron 4 We've had pretty good conversations with not just Jensen, but the whole executive team there, including Colette. And we're going to continue working on a lot more projects.

Eric Newcomer (3:23)

Have you had the opportunity today? I mean, it's only been a couple of hours to kind of check in with the team there and see how things are functioning at this company. Yeah, we have.

Aravind Srinivas (3:31)

I had a meeting with them even today. So things are going as usual and, you know, business has to go on. And even now, like, the best GPUs to run your inference is Nvidia and best GPUs to run your training is Nvidia.

And none of that stops. So we just have to continue building the future.

Eric Newcomer (3:48)

Yeah. And last question on this. I mean, have they said anything to you as a major partner to kind of let you know what continuity looks like and then kind of let you know that, like, while we deal with this fairly insane, unprecedented situation, like the relationship you have with Nvidia will be unchanged in many ways.