Silicon Valley Girl: AI, Tech and Career Growth - Perplexity CEO: AI Is About to Change the Internet Forever | Aravind Srinivas

Episode Date: September 26, 2025

In this episode of Silicon Valley Girl with Marina Mogilko features an interview with Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, exploring how artificial intelligence is transforming careers, education, and decision-making, while shifting power from corporations to individuals.Founded in 2022, Perplexity has grown at remarkable speed - by 2025, the company reached a valuation of $20 billion, underscoring its role as one of the most influential players in the AI landscape.Links: Follow my Newsletter:⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/⁠⁠Companies & Products: ⁠⁠https://Marinamogilko.co⁠⁠Instagram: ⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠YouTube: ⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠LinkedIn: ⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠X: ⁠⁠https://x.com/siliconvalleymm⁠⁠

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Fit for your ambition for Citizens Bank. So if you are 18 today in the U.S. and has to start all over again, would you still do Bachelor's PhD? Realistically, it's gone. This is Aravind, CEO and founder of perplexity, a $20 billion company challenging giants like OpenAI, Google and Meta. They just released Comet, the first AI browser that thanks and act for you.

It also understands you, your needs, your budget, everything. It has memory. I tried it myself and wow. It can book meetings, reply to emails, research, products, even shop online, all without me. Amazon has AI to do the recommendation ranking. Google has AI to do the search ranking. So they can influence things and manipulate you to buying stuff. But for the first time, you have an AI in your hands. It actually protects you. It actually gives you. you power against the big tech. But while AI gives you unprecedented power, it's also reshaping the world of work faster than anyone expected.

And it looks like those entry-level jobs are disappearing, right? What do you think is going to happen? I certainly think people need to push further. So is there still opportunity or is it time to rethink everything? Hello everyone. Welcome to Silicon Valley Girl. It is the first time that I have a repeated guest on my podcast and your progress has been tremendous. We did a podcast with Aravint, the founder of Perplexity, in November at 2023.

The company's valuation back then was $500 million, and now it's around. Actually, we were just closing our CIPA around then. So it was more like 150 and we were just about to close around at $520. Okay. And now it's $20 billion? Yeah, roughly. Okay, can you describe this period of time in one word? Exponential.

Exponential? Yeah. What do you think has played a tremendous role in this exponential growth? I think our constant urge for like shipping fast, yet maintaining the quality, our relentlessness, like I love the word relentless. In fact, I wanted to buy the domain Relentless.com, except I figured it was owned by Jeff Bezos. Really?

So if you actually type Relentless.com on your browser, it will redirect to Amazon.com. an investor in our company. That's like the spirit of the company. We don't ever give up. We are very curious. We constantly keep asking questions on how to improve the product. The first thing I do and I wake up is read everything.

People are all the users saying on different social platforms. I make sure most of the bugs are immediately attended to. And you may think like, oh, what really comes out of this process of waking up every day and just bug fixing and triaging and like trying to? and like trying to like, you know, identify places for improvement. But we really believe in the mantra of like 1.01 to the power 365 is 37.78. Can you explain? Okay.

So if you do a 1% improvement every day, how much do you improve at the end of the year? You improve 3,700 percent. You don't improve like 1% multiplied by 365. That's the concept of the exponential. Yeah. It compounds. And so it may look like. like small steps every day.

But as the changes propagate to a larger scale of users, they bring in more users through word of mouth. And then those users are experiencing all the improvements you're making. People feel great using a product that, you know, you used last week and then use it like a couple of weeks later and it feels much more different, much faster, much cleaner, much more accurate. So then people start trusting. We earn the users trust through our.

accuracy, a speed of improvement. And your marketing, Formula One, the Wong? Have you seen the spikes after, like, Formula One and when the episode one live? It's hard to attribute to these kind of brand partnerships. It's very easy to attribute. You run some ads on Instagram or YouTube, and like there's a clear call-to-action button in terms of, you know, going to the App Store, or Play Store, and getting an install. And then looking at, like, how many queries that translated to or whether that user ended up

subscribing to the app, it's very easy to. track this and optimize the funnels. It's much harder to optimize, okay, like if Lewis Hamilton has perplexity on his helmet, how many people are actually going and installing the app after a Formula One race? No. It's pretty difficult to track that. It is. Best way to track that is like brand awareness.

Like, oh, like, are people in the UK or people who typically are in the Formula One crowd, are they more aware of perplexity now? And I think that should be the case. We have run some basic studies. but the core idea there is honestly to associate our brand with some of the greatest people of all time. You know, Steve Jobs ran this famous think different campaign, right? He got the inspiration from Nike because Nike celebrated great athletes.

So that's why in the ad you see Einstein, you see Gandhi, you see all these like, like, you know, the Beatles. You see all the people who really inspired Steve. And so that's one thing we've been pretty intentional about, like who we want to associate with in terms of the brand, like at least in sports, Lewis Hamilton is one of the greatest of all the time. It's considered the greatest of all the time in Formula One.

And so that's why we did that brand partnership. And we're also going to be doing more, like particularly, you know, an F1. It's a pretty cerebral sport. Like everyone's attracted by all the hospitality and like the race cars and like, you know, it's very high adrenaline thing. But fundamentally the sport is largely engineering oriented. Like, who has the best engine? Who has, who's licensing, whose engines?

Like, I think it's all about constructors, like, competing for, like, who has the best cars? And skills still matters. Conditions matters. Tires matters. Like, like, everything matters. So we do see, like, a lot of people asking these kind of questions. There was this huge spike in queries in June compared to May. Mm-hmm.

Can you attribute that to something? What happened? I don't know if it happened in June or July, but definitely we grew a lot in the last couple of months. Actually, the main event that happened in July that I would say is fundamentally led to growth is like our release of our agentic browser, for the first time, you could have a browser that can actually think with you and take actions on your behalf and actually go and do stuff. I have comment right here. Yeah. Can you show one killer feature that you think everyone should start using on comment?

I love this thing because it's a very simple thing where it kind of always works. You know, if you want to go to, if there's some video, I remember I watched before, but I don't know exactly what it is. And I can search for it with just simple natural language and ask it to just open and play from that exact moment. So, for example, there's a video where Jensen Huang says, I would rather torture people to greatness than fire them. Can you find it and play it for me from, from that exact moment.

So the point here is not that it can do a video search or anything like that. It's how it does multi-step reasoning, finds the video, pulls the transcript, and actually opens tab and starts playing. Wow. That was the phrase that I was hoping.

And then you can chat with this video, something that I did yesterday when I was watching what you were interviews. There are a lot of other videos here. I could go here. This is like one hour long. I could literally say, like what are some

non-trivial things Jensen said in this interview? Something like that, right? Like I don't want to watch everything at me. Maybe he's saying a lot of things that is repetitively saying that AI is going to explode, blah, blah, blah,

but I only want to know new things. Yeah. And so it's reading all the transcripts. It's particularly talking about you know, GPUs time machines. Like I've never heard him say that. GPUs is time machines. And of course,

like scale and flexibility, science to application, omnivorous with cost. So I can actually say, can you just share this as an email? I don't know if you're connected it to your... I have, yeah, yeah. Can you send this as an email

to Aravind, Sweenieva, the founder and CEO for Flexity? You can actually even edit it. You can even add, say, send from comment or something like that. And you can even refine the email if you want. You can just send it. Try it from there.

You don't have to copy paste this. You don't have to open this tab. You're going to have to like compose email. This is just one example. You could also schedule meetings from here. You could say, order the leather jacket. Jensen's wearing for me on Amazon. It's going to find it.

Of course, it's going to be pretty expensive. So it's not going to place the order directly. So it's going to do a lot of these like multi-step things. What's going to happen to businesses who survive on paid ads? Is it going to skip paid ads? or how is it going to research information about what product to buy? So you can instruct your comment assistant to say, like, I want you to just skip all the ads.

When you're asking comment to go watch YouTube for you, you can ask comments, say, ignore all the ads, just get me the core sense of what the content is about. You could ask comment to say, like, go look at like favorite Instagram influencers of airing and go read the reviews of all of them. And then tell me what's best for me, based on what you already know about me,

and go buy it for me. So how can businesses optimize for that experience? I would say that what businesses should really do is, like really focus on this building a great product and get a lot of people talking about it. Like reviews, right? Because perplexity, reads reviews, watch this videos, so get as much content with your product as possible, right?

The solution shouldn't be to like paying people to write great things about you. But honestly, like building a great product and getting the word out. and then people talk about it, rave about it, and then comment reads all that, and is able to, like, suggest that to you. That would be the way to go in my opinion. How fast do you think we're going to switch to asking our AI assistance to buy things for us? I think you can do that already.

I mean, like, there's the friction in society, and I remember you were talking about, like, how we were overpaying, I don't know, real estate people, financial advisors, but still when I think about a person who's in their 60s who's done it for a while, they're not going to just switch to AI to do things for them. I'll tell you an anecdote, which kind of convince me why it's worth building these things. I was once having a haircut, Samaranoi Valley when he used to live there, and another person was also having a haircut in the same place.

And he was somewhat older, and he was ranting about how he spent his entire day until that haircut, they were probably three, four hours, just looking for a new washing machine. Because it's a pretty expensive purchase. So you're going to spend a lot of time deciding what to buy. And you've based on your entire day just reading reviews and watching videos and exploring through reviews. And you end up getting even more confused than you were at the beginning. And this is the kind of thing we want to help you.

Like make really good decisions really quickly and delegate all the mundane cognitive labor to something like comment. Like why do you want to read all the reviews? Like it's boring. Anyway, people are paid to write good things. So how do you get the signal from the noise? It's like you have to consume the reviews across different platforms, not just one platform. I could pay someone to write good reviews on Google Maps,

but I couldn't necessarily pay someone to do it on every single platform. I wouldn't be that thoughtful. So definitely if your product is pretty bad, overhyped, then someone's going to say something negative on YouTube or Redis. And if Reflexi is going to see it. Yeah, and if Replisci will give you a pretty balanced perspective, okay, here are the five different things. things. Like, imagine reading, like, 30, 40 tabs in, like, the matter of few seconds or minutes,

and then telling you what to do. And it also understands you, your needs, your budget, everything, right? It has memory. The comet can answer questions for yourself. Um, like, you know, it can give you tips on how to do better. So, uh, I think that's the kind of way in which we feel, um, AI is less about like, you know, whether someone's old or young, uh, whether someone's, like, uh, you know, more used to traditional tools. like quick to change and adopt new things. It's truly above the utility. But I'll give you another example.

I was doing like a stage like talk for a partnership with Motorola. I asked Comet to go read all the like, you know, talks giving Vigants and Steve Jobs and everything. And also read the current draft. It was written by my comsperson. And then I want you to edit it a little bit to feel a little more grandiose. But I still want to preserve how I speak. So you watch my interviews too. And you watch these guys' interviews and you try to blend a little where, you know,

I want to say something that slightly feel more inspiring. But I don't want to appear inauthentic. And so, and it did a great job, actually. You did such a good job that I was like, damn, I would have paid someone like $1,000 for that. Let's transition to 2030. What a shopping look like? Everybody has an AI agent. that they talk to.

So Amazon app is dead. Walmart app is dead. I wouldn't say it's dead. Fundamentally, the modes for companies like Amazon and Walmart is physical real estate. The warehouses, the stores, like for Walmart's the stores. And like the packaging and the supply chain, like. But the app itself, the shopping experience is going to be. The core shopping experience might not matter.

This is essentially what we've been talking about ever since the beginning. It doesn't matter if it's Amazon. or Google or Walmart, I think it's fundamentally like what's good for the user. Actually, the founder of Amazon and so it says this. You always want a long-term alignment between the customer

and the shareholder. And as you said, as a customer, you just said that you don't care about ads. You actually don't want. Yeah, I want to skip them. You want what is good for you. So just show me that and I'll pay you more money. And that's the kind

of relationship you're going to have with your combat assistant. Maybe the advertisers are still going to exist. It's not like a complete end of ads. Advertisers might be trying to talk to the agent, not to you. But the agent would protect- But then I can code it to ignore the ads.

Exactly. And that's a handshake agreement you have with your agent that the advertiser cannot influence or cannot like manipulate. And that's what protects you. But I do think like you might be open to some ads. Like for example, let's say you have an assistant that works in a team. You're running a podcast.

And so maybe there is a new microphone that's really good, but not many people know about it. They go and tells the person working on in your team, hey, like, can you please tell Silicon Valley Go to go use this our microphone actually, it's pretty good. That's kind of like an ad to you, but it's being told to you to your team. And you trust that person on your team, so you know that that person's not going to unnecessarily. So you're going to evaluate it, not just take it as well. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Is that how you're going to monetize this experience?

We haven't thought deeply about it. I'm just imagining a future where ads were done with the level of agents. And also between apps. So, for example, you might be tasking common to do something, like book me a ride. And then the three different apps, like Uber Lyft and something else, might be like, hey, I think I can deliver the best ride for her. And then the agent knows your preference that you prefer Uber, let's say. and then it could be like, you know what,

like I really want to win her business. So I'm actually going to offer this right for free. Just tell her that experience will be better than Uber. The competitor could say that. The agent could charge some revenue for, you know, the apps trying to get your attention and share it back with you. Yeah. Which Google never does.

So Google takes your queries, does a bidding process among different companies trying to like bid for that query and takes all the money. Doesn't share it with anyone. That's why they have profit margins, a high answer. But that's bad for the user because you at the end are getting influenced. On the other hand, I'm saying

there are two levels of protection. One is, I don't let you directly see any ad. And even if your agency is the ad, the company that runs the agent gets some of it, but the user also gets some of it. And only, that's the best way to continue to win the user's trust by saying, okay, I'm actually,

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I love that model. That way our margins are lower, but our trust is higher. So the lifetime value, the LTV is higher because you trust more. And as long as the agent is not getting manipulated and therefore you're not getting manipulated, this model could work. So all roads lead to a future where the ad margins are going to go lower. That's for sure. Because the user has an AI in their hands for the first time.

Until now, AI existed in the hands of the advertising company. Like Amazon has AI do the recommendation ranking. Google has AI to do the search ranking. So they can influence things and manipulate you to buying stuff because that's what the advertisers are. Those are the tools being provided to the advertisers to optimize their campaigns. But for the first time, you have an AI in your hands,

the cognitive system. That works for me. That works for you. It doesn't work for the advertiser. It actually protects you. It actually gives you power against them. you have intelligence on your demand to summon and do your bidding based on the prompt and your memory and your preferences. And so that's a contract between you an agent and that's giving you power against the big debt.

And therefore, some of that money can flow back to you for the first time. I love that. I love the way you think about that. I hope everybody who's creating AI agents thinks that way you too. What about other jobs? So I asked perplexity. I asked it to analyze my portfolio. Okay.

And I asked it whether I should find my financial advisor. And it was like, yes, you should do this immediately. Like that's the first time I saw something that definitive from AI because it said, you know, this is strategy. He's utilizing. He's buying very expensive mutual funds. Like, what's going to happen to these professions? Financial advisors, real estate brokers. Yeah.

Because perplexity does it now. And it created the whole strategy for me to rebalance and everything. Yeah. I've thought about this actually. The way I think about it is like real estate agents getting the listings on like Redfinalsilo, with like a comment like browser or say you just have a recurring task that's running it's not it's not yet there so people watch isn't going to try it doesn't work yet but it's going to work pretty soon which is you could just have a task that says every day morning just look at all the new lessons on redfin

you know these are the preferences i have i know redfin kind of already has some of these features but it's not it's very hard-coded and there's a lot of selector drops and filters don't really work properly, but you could have something like every time there's a house below a certain budget and that's within this neighborhood, make sure to like send me a push notification and submit an application on my behalf and schedule a meeting for a visit. You have access to my calendar, everything. You can, you can. So if your agent only shows you listings on Redfin and Zillow, I think they're useful.

But if your agent is doing off-market deals for you, they're still pretty useful because those things do not exist on the web. I feel like having the power of intelligence and computer at your hands. It always comes back to that. It means you can push the existing industry to work harder for you. Same thing with private wealth management or financial advisors. The job of the financial advisor tell you what stocks to buy, then I don't think they're not going to be smarter than perplexity,

which you can go and ask it to go read all the analyst reports in every stock and all the morning day news and they come back to you and tell you like the impacting your portfolio what would Warren Buffett do if he had exactly your portfolio like it can answer questions like that that no financial advisor can't

but if your financial advisor does more stuff for you like getting you some access to certain funds like private equity or hedge funds or access to like funds or Citadel or something like that that you cannot

or like some startups, venture capital which you cannot get through just the public markets, then maybe they're useful, right? It's all about, like, you have this new power in your hands. So go and ask the people who are taking your money to do more work for you or the contract between you and their ends. And it looks like those entry-level jobs are disappearing, right? Because you're an entry-level financial advisor you're going to only do, like, managing

stocks. What do you think is going to happen? Yeah, I certainly think, like, people need to push further. Like, if you're just literally managing people, you're not doing much, Like, I have some private wealth managers too. And I think the way I used to, like, helping me move money around those kind of things because I don't have time to manage all this myself.

There, they help me through their time, and they also give me some advice on, like, you know, what to do stuff, how to save taxes, a little bit, those kind of things. So your value ad should expand further than just managing a portfolio. If we apply this to any market, how can you do this as a recent graduate? And do you believe people still need to do their PhDs like you did?

Yeah. That error is over. The fundamental thing you learn a PhD is learning to learn. Like I did a lot of research in my PhD, which doesn't matter today. But I got the ability to like go learn a new topic, dig deep, understand everything, gather my information, consult like whoever's the best expert, which by the way is not needed anymore because you have tools like perplexity. But let's say, you know, you have the ability to ask the right.

questions and then you acquire a certain level of subject expertise to go make decisions and like you branch out that is what you acquire that skill is it worth four years that's the thing i would say like i decided to a phdbjee for many reasons um and one of them obviously was my own interest in the topic but the other was my that was my only way to get to america a lot of indians come here for masters but you got to realize that in order to come here for masters you need to be able to fund your own tuition fee. And I didn't have that ability. So PhD, the university pays for you.

Masters, you pay the university. So that was one of my reasons, not the only reason. So obviously, just because someone gives you a free entry ticket to the United States, that means you should do a PhD because it's a pretty grueling journey. So I had a deep passion for the topic. I loved AI. I love the ability. I like digging deep into things.

I'm fundamentally curious about learning deep. deeply about any topic. So those are attributes that you think you align with. I think that journey is very, very useful in your life. I don't believe that you need a PhD to be contributing positively to AI as a topic, either as a researcher or engineer or entrepreneur. But I think if you zoom out and think beyond materialistic goals, like just foundationally as a person,

you become a lot more grounded in the willingness to seek truth, the relentless questioning the Socratic method of learning and learning to learn. And I feel like these three qualities are like reflective of this proverb or phrase, right? Like give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime.

Like that's how I feel about PhD. And so that's why I would still recommend people to do it if you truly want to be someone that enjoys learning about music. Like maybe I can stop doing this thing and I can still find a new feel or a new topic to go and I can still bet on myself

to like learn that and be successful at it. So if you were 18 today in the US and has to start all over again, would you still do a bachelor's base? I actually came here when I was 22. I finished my undergrad and came here. But if you were in the US

and you had to start your career from scratch, what would you do? Look, I would definitely pursue my interests. But 18 is too early to not. know what you're interested in. A lot of people think they know what they're interested in, but I feel my personal opinion is that 18 is still pretty early. So I would just pick something and try to do it well.

I think people underestimate the importance of having that inner confidence in you to bet on yourself. That no matter what you do, you can do it well. So unless you've done some things like that in your life already, like try to actually go and do something. like commit yourself to one thing and do it for a sustained period of time because it's very hard to be good at something if you just do it for like a couple of months. You need a year or two to actually get really good, like top notch at something.

It could be programming, it could be math, it could be AI, it could be like writing apps. It doesn't matter. It takes time to actually be really good. So I would suggest them to like go deep into something. It could be an undergraduate education. It could be like finding a software job that's, one of the existing companies. You could start out as an intern

if they don't hire you full time and then convert. And like, four in the hours. Like, I regret like watching YouTube video. I know you're a YouTuber. So, kind of weird. People are saying, and we're doing a whole YouTube thing. So, yeah, you should watch YouTube and get knowledge out of it.

But I remember telling Sundar when I talked to him that, hey, like, YouTube's a great app, but I wish you focused more on knowledge and learning and he agreed with me. Because it's not just that, right? So I regret the amount of time I wasted on YouTube just watching useless stuff. When you're very young, just utilize the time, surround yourself like peers who would push you to be better, learn a lot, like be a learning machine, or like work really, really hard. And then you acquire that ability to go and be good at anything.

You can bet on yourself. okay, like, how do you take on hard tasks in life? You can only take it on if you have some confidence that, you know, you can keep persisting of things are not going your way and like you'll see the light at the end of the tunnel. You have to have had to do it at least once in your life to bet on yourself for the next next set of it. Is that where your confidence comes from? Yeah, I've done like, we're going to take over. Google, we're going to take over.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, you don't need to take over. Like, you can just, you know, be successful in your own way. but when you have a competitor like Google, it's very hard. Like that's what turns most people off. Like, sorry, when turns most people away is like, how do you compete in a space where, okay, let's say when we started, there were some other startups that were trying to do the same thing.

They're all not around anymore. Like they either sold or like they pivoted. So as you keep going every stage from the seed round to like where we are today, your set of competitors keep, you know, going away too. And you're like surviving, surviving, surviving. It's like squid games. And then finally you're ending up in a scenario or the arena where it says Google, Open AI and yourself.

And funding wise, you know, like we raised a billion dollars. Open AI rates close to 80 billion or 70 billion. Google has like $100 billion in just a cash. And they make $200,000 billion a year in revenue. So you are obviously competing with like giant monster. So you have to like bet on yourself to like still figure out ways. Despite the whole world screaming, you do that, you have to sell to Apple, you're to sell to metal. The game is over.

Like you're, it's going to die in a couple of years. I bet I can bet my entire savings that this company is going to go with nothing. And you have to be able to read all that and like still motivate yourself and also motivate the people who have trusted you to like be the investors or the employees are working here. I always see like those who take equity in our company. They're basically trusting the leadership and the company to like deliver. What do you tell yourself when you read those comments? Tell myself that I'll prove you wrong.

And it keeps you going. Yeah. That's amazing. Do you think that's your main trait that made you who you are, your conflict? One of my important traits. I wouldn't say that's the singular. I would say the single main trait at the end. It's not primal or anything.

I generally just like to learn a lot about any topic. And I enjoy the intellectual aspects of it. That's my most important trait, I would say. People have multiple traits and so do I. And the survival instinct is definitely like something that's, you know, served me very well. I love that. I mean, immigrants are all survival. Yeah.

We are. Yeah. Do you still work 24-7? No one can work 24-7. Well, almost the time you're awake. Yeah. I technically, no, I do spend, like, I'm working out. I do spend time with my family.

So I do work or think of what work almost every waking hour. So it's very hard for me to not look at my phone or not check notifications, not be thinking about some problem in my head, zoning out sometimes when someone's talking to me, trying to stay a person in the moment. These are all like hard things. And so these are the things I would sacrifice in order to like do whatever I'm doing really well. People like to think like, oh, work is work.

After you go back home, you just shut down Slack and like your laptop. you never open it and they're just like staying present in the moment at home i i cannot do that and uh even on a walk like i'm thinking about something there's some phone calls so yeah if that counts us work yes uh i mean i've always my mom like whenever i was young like always said like uh anything that's not quality like time undistracted time there's not really work and i i've always believed that like yes i can be replying on slack while i'm walking taking a walk uh that doesn't mean I'm really working. Some people like to count that as hard. I know Elon says he works a lot of the way. I'm sure he counts all that. But it's truly like the time I spend where I'm just

looking at the product and thinking how to improve it. Or I'm like talking to some of our people internally on what we can do to grow the app more or like what are all the new ideas we can put in the app to make it even better. How can we improve the orchestration of the models even better. How can we reduce the cause? How can we ship new features where all the new things we're doing? Those are the times when I think I'm uninterrupted state. And that's where I feel like I can do my best work. And that usually happens during the day. Other than that, I'm mostly just multitasking. A couple last questions for everyone who's trying to build something in AI. Do you think opportunities still exists aside from, like everyone's building a GPT rubber? Do you so there is still opportunity

for that or people should switch and what are the areas that they should be looking at? Realistically, it's gotten much harder. Yes, like you would want to build a GPT wrapper because building your own models like basically way harder. It's almost impossible for yeah, almost impossible and I don't even think people should be looking at it as like building a model once. That's the mistake everybody made. It's whoever tried to build models around the time we started. I was like, yeah, how much does it cost to launch? I even had it. investor who now went to META and it's like, oh, it's going to cost $200,000 to print a GP3 model. So why can't you do it?

I'll give you like a million and you spend 200K on the model. Like it's not about like that one model. It's about that relentless exercise of iterating the models, building the next cluster, hiring the talent to go figure out like what the next model should be and continually iterating, bringing down the cost, improving the capabilities, improving the reasoning, all that stuff. that requires a lab and a cluster and the people and the milestones and like some way to like actually turn all those models into like a product and a business and revenue and then you end up basically like saying oh you have to build another open eye or another end product then what are you like why do you need to exist like where is a talent arbitrage so that's why I think product is actually at least you know a little more statistically probable but even there you have to compete with the likes of the labs themselves, which are building their own products and the big tech companies and like upstarts like us.

And no one's going to be like, oh, perplexies is just going to do research. I can go do the commerce stuff. Perplexes and commerce. Exactly, right? Like everyone's building horizontal products. And that applies to us to, oh, Chad ChpT will never do shopping. Chatsby will never do travel. We want to finance.

All that is like not true. Like, everyone's going to do anything that works. So I would just say the bet you can make is do what you truly are obsessed about. Because fundamentally, it's a bet on yourself. It's not a bet on the market. It's not a bet on ecosystem. Like, what competitors will do, will not do. Like, don't try to be this whiteboard strategy master.

Like, it's completely pointless. It's like when your idea works and gets like 100 million or like billion in revenue, always expect existing people to go after it because everyone's looking for that incremental revenue in AI because the cap-ex is so high. So the only way to justify all this is to actually turn that into like business profits. And so they'll go after you. So the only thing you can bet on is whether you're so obsessible topic that you will do it anywhere, regardless of all the odds stacked against you.

And then you'll prove the world wrong because you go so far deep. into that and no one cared about their problem more than we did. And for us, like for me, like that's why the whole, you know, you asked me what my most important trade is, like, I love learning and and this is one of the best apps for learning. It's designed for us, it's designed for our founders, like we built it for ourselves. Key bet was everybody in the world allows for having an AI that they can summon to go do stuff for them. Everybody wants more time in their lives. So I think build for yourself. Hopefully, That's a thing that a lot of people in the world want,

and therefore you can turn it into a scalable product and a scalable company. And get acquired. Some stage, I guess. Thank you. That's a great answer. My last question, do you use anything aside from perplexity in terms of AI apps? And what are your top-three favorite then?

Well, as part of my job, I am required to use other apps to see what they are doing better than us, because no one's going to be best at everything. So I have all the AI apps on my phone, you know, like Chat Chpity, GROC, Gemini, Cloud, almost all of them I have it. I don't have co-pilot and plot, but maybe mainly because they're not that mainstream in terms of consumer distribution. But in terms of organic usage, like I do go pretty often and try, I would say I've tested ChatteBee the most. But again, it mostly comes down to testing. You don't use any, like, wrapper apps that are specific for, I don't know, nutrition or image editing. So if you need something, you would just ask perplexity.

Yeah, if it doesn't work, I would ask it in chat GPT. And if it doesn't work there also, for example, if I need to edit it, I'll just do my usage, right? If I need to do image editing, I've done that. And if it doesn't work on both chat GPT and perplexity, then I would just write code myself and do it. I love that. But that's just me. Yeah, same thing with like search. Like if it does, like, for example, we have an integrated tennis course, and I love tennis.

I like following the life scores. So I go to Google and, you know, get the score. We haven't all done currency conversions all the time. Like, we are still working on that. So I use Google for, like, some of the widgets they have. And then sometimes finding these needles in a haystack, like, links, we're not, like, best product on that yet. What do you mean by, by links? Like, there are some really old links.

on the like some blog post that I'm I definitely remember I read it like when I was a kid and perplexity sometimes helps me find that but it's very old links so um I still trained to use Google with all the macros like I know how to like suffix the dates and like all that stuff so that's because we grew up like that right like back then like Googling was actually a skill so if you knew how to like search for links with those specific phrases yeah and or contains and like those dates, fixes, you can get whatever you want.

And that also gives me ideas on how to improve the reflexity product too. Maybe you teach the AI to use some of these macros yourself and then against your index, your building, and train that to retrieve these things with these keyword arguments. So, yeah,

so my life, I think I mostly say perplexity, Google, chat GPT, I think these are the three main apps they use, mid-journey sometimes, because it has a pretty good aesthetic quality in it. And then, yeah, I feel like that's it.

Got it. I mean, it's a kind of a boring answer, I guess. But yeah, but that's you, right? Yeah, that's me. That's you. The thing is, like, Comet lets me do anything right now. Yeah. Like, I don't even have to upload these separate apps.

The Comet as a browser, it actually does better search than even perplexity. Well, you make it free for everyone with all the features? Not every feature. We have to make some money here. But yeah, but almost all the features we think will be available to everybody. And it's going to be on mobile too, right? Or is it? Because I'm only using it on desktop. That's right.

So we just announced today that the Play Store, like you can re-register to get it. App Store pre-registering will be announced shortly. By end of the year, I think we should have it available on iOS and Android. and then also I would be generally available on this stuff for both Windows and Mac I love it it generally it is a case

So that's the thing with comment by the way you can summon it to go use my journey, go use Photoshop and just do it for you. You don't even have these apps you explicitly open so it's a super app it's an everything app. It is, it is fascinating.

Thank you so much. That is so inspiring. I feel like we're tapping into future like actually right now. Thank you. Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is California's number one entertainment destination for today's superstars. Catch the Jonas Brothers return to the Yamava Theater stage on April 30th, the powerful vocals of Demi Lovato on May 17th,

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