Perplexity CEO: SMBs Could Drive the Next Economic Boom

Molly O'Shea (0:00)

Joining us is Aravind Srinivas.

SPEAKER_2 (0:01)

He is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity.

Molly O'Shea (0:03)

Perplexity has been on quite the tear.

SPEAKER_2 (0:05)

Perplexity rolling out its AI browser, Comet to all users this week.

Aravind Srinivas (0:09)

The data center is coming to your laptop. When we started, people made fun of us. We did it in a way that essentially became the blueprint for every other chatbot out there.

Molly O'Shea (0:17)

A lot of brands have really bad aura. You guys have great aura.

Aravind Srinivas (0:21)

Our brand is fundamentally to celebrate curiosity. We think that'll be the only quality we human beings can be proud of. Search is actually compounding. Every form of eugenic action requires access to the web, access to a cloud, browser, access to context across connectors, files and tools, and putting it all together and orchestrating across models. I can't think of another company that's better positioned than us to do that. We don't have competitors. We have contributors. We're very glad to partner with amazing chip companies like Nvidia and Apple, Intel. We're gonna work with all of them.

SPEAKER_2 (0:52)

As Nvidia reportedly weighs investing in the company at a more than $30 billion valuation.

Molly O'Shea (1:07)

Aravind, thank you so much for having us here at Perplexity. I know you guys just moved into this office.

Aravind Srinivas (1:12)

Thanks for coming by. And maybe once we're fully settled in here, we can do a proper tour around the office. I'd be happy to.

Molly O'Shea (1:19)

The walk-in talks have been really popular. It's funny, we were just in Italy with Bending Spoons and they were calling it a walkie-talkie. So we'll do a walkie-talkie with you.

So before we started rolling, we were talking about all the AI brands and, you know, there's a war between all of them. But the one thing that I've particularly noticed with you and Perplexity is you've withheld an above board brand the entire time.

Aravind Srinivas (1:48)

Our brand is fundamentally to celebrate curiosity.

We picked that because we think that will be the only quality we human beings can be proud of and lean into even more as AIs get better and better. Like, you could argue that AI is the best accelerant of our own curiosity. Like, almost the purpose of AIs to accelerate human curiosity. And David Deutsch, the famous Oxford physicist, he has this quote that thesis almost that human beings are the only species that are capable of being curious about what is already familiar to us. Like, we might know something, and then we could take a look at it again and try to think about it from a different perspective. Animals don't tend to do that. And that's very interesting because you could argue that, oh, like, AIs can solve all the problems. AIs can answer whatever question there is. So, what's our role? Our role is to actually go and ask the next set of questions.

We actually were designed to ask questions, but we grow up in settings where we are rewarded for answers until AIs came to exist. And now it's like, it's not necessarily cool to be able to know it all anymore, because an AI can answer everything. Nobody needs to go and find an expert to learn about a topic. You can actually just go to the AI. Whatever AI you trust for accurate answers, whatever it is. But then what is your purpose? Your purpose is to actually lean into your curiosity even more and not be afraid of asking whatever questions, however dumb they are, however of an outsider you feel the topic. You don't have to feel that bottleneck or fear of being judged and so our brand is built around that. We think that the best companies always have a fundamental brand that has nothing to do with the technology, more to do with humanity and people. Steve Jobs built a brand for Apple about putting beautiful things out there because that's the best way to celebrate and give back to mankind.

Nvidia's mission was just make things possible that only supercomputers can. It was never about AI. Even today, if you go to their website and read about their mission, it's about like do things that are beyond the realms of regular computing. And that applies to AI today, but it could apply to quantum computing tomorrow. It could apply to something else later. It could apply to cryptocurrency or Bitcoin money, whatever it is. I think it's very important that you build a brand around things that has nothing to do with technology, but fundamentally accelerating something related to human progress and human qualities. And then that's what we're very proud of getting that right from the beginning.