Lecture by Arvind Srinivas, Co-Founder and CEO of Perplexity AI

Introduction

• Perplexity AI: conversational search engine
• Aim: revolutionize online information consumption
• Launch date: Dec 7, 2022
• Current status: ~10M monthly active users

Personal Background

• Grew up in India, studied at IIT
• Interest in algorithms and programming from the beginning
• First exposure to machine learning through a contest
  • Won the contest easily
  • Led to deeper interest and PhD in AI and deep learning at Berkeley
• Internship at OpenAI in 2018
  • Realized need for improvement in programming and first principles thinking
  • Learned about new learning from internet data (GPT-1)

Academic Pursuit and Transition to Entrepreneurship

• Focus on combining generative AI with reinforcement learning
• Inspiration from Larry Page: either professor or entrepreneur
• Limits of other career paths: constrained by others' visions
• AI as ultimate version of Google: Understand and give precise answers

Founding Perplexity AI

• Unique selling point: conversational search with citations
• Concept: Ask a question and get an instant answer with references
• Academic influence: co-founders are PhDs, importance of citations
• Building the copilot feature to expand prompts interactively

Product Growth and Quality

• Initial launch queries: ~2-3K per day
• Current queries: ~3-4M per day
• Growth driven by word of mouth
• Focus on quality: eliminating spam, concise summaries, avoiding hallucinations
• Challenge: orchestrating multiple components to deliver high quality answers

Pricing Strategy

• Pro plan: $20/month (same as ChatGPT Plus)
  • Use of OpenAI's GPT-4
  • Testing if users value Perplexity's unique offering

Approach to Startups

• Focus on very few things
• Execution over spreading thin
• Shift features only when existing users are satisfied
• Set a culture of urgency and continuous improvement

Key Business and Life Insights

• Simplify complex problems by identifying the most important factors
• Avoid equal weighting of pros and cons
• Improvement over perfection

Final Advice

• Pursue what you love since passions remain constant amidst change
• Mission over money: focus on making products better and increasing user base
• Personal fulfillment comes from continuous engagement and improvement