Perplexity Wants To Help You Find Better Answers On The Internet | Forbes

what AI do you use how do you use perplexity in your day-to-day and what other tools do you use perplexity I use it more as a Search tool I still don't like using AI for writing it s so anything I write memos or messages I just write it myself I don't like autoc complete sty writing like it feels very unnatural hi everyone I'm Kenrick Kai I'm a staff writer at Forbes and I'm the editor on our AI 50 list of the most prominent ing artificial intelligence startups I'm joined by arvand shras the co-founder and CEO of perplexity a newcomer to our list this year Arvin thanks for taking the time to chat with me thank you for having me here so uh you worked at open aai you worked at Google and then you started this company professionally uh when did you start it why did you start it what's the origin story yeah uh the company was started in August 2022 uh the origin story is that um I was always interested in doing a startup ever since 2019 uh when I came for to birthday for PhD and got a chance to do a lot of internships and um AI resource was still at a point where it was not ready for products but that started changing in 2021 uh we started hearing rumors that there were startups like copy Ai and Jasper making a lot of Revenue by building on top open AI models and Dolly was one of the first things I saw where was actually a research project but then when you put it out it seems like a product that people can use open a image sh yeah exactly and GitHub co-pilot was just a model but then became in great autocomplete product so it was very clear that uh until then there it the thinking about a doing startups was like you got to go build a business and this sprinkle AI after you build a business right uh now the thinking changed you can build AI natively as a business like the model itself can be a business uh and um so I felt like I could finally have a shot at this game M uh but the thinking was more like let's try to go build a product not to become another Foundation model company um and so there were investors like elot Gil and natri were like pretty interested in funding such ideas at that time uh and this was note that this was also so a time when open AI was not even interested in building a first party product yeah it was more an API ch right so that was the amount of wisdom at the time uh and also success from other people outside open like Min Journey or uh Jasper copy a co-pilot from GitHub all made it clear that you could use these models and build amazing product experiences uh so we started off with that ambition to do something like that and uh I was always a big fan of Google and AR and Sergey they deeply inspired me a lot because uh as a researcher I always wanted to find examples of entrepreneurs that were similar to are my background and all the typical examples like zaker b or Gates or jobs were all like undergraduate prop outs who star compies so I couldn't really identify with their story um and and so there was always a deep desire in me to like be part of a journey where uh a a research background helps you to build a product in a uniquely differentiated way than what a typical consuming product lter would do and uh it turns out that somehow you you think of all these ideas you converge to search all the time like that's how it was like we started working on so many LM based product ideas data analyst AI data analy and things like that but then we would converge to just like oh searching over your databases searching over your table searching over your spr cheats and at some point we realized that hey like uh why are we restricting our to like so many narrow domains that was an investor asked to make us Focus what if we try to be a little more ambitious and just say we search over the whole web yeah and and that ended up becoming our for product idea so tell me a little bit about the product uh perplexity uh so it's a sort of search engine without the links or without the links so front and center uh nvidia's CEO Jensen Quang Shopify CEO Toby Lot K have talked about being users of it um what is perplexity why is it caught on with Business Leaders in the way that it has yeah so perplexity is an answer and uh you can go here directly ask a question and get answers and the answers are supported with citations references almost like how you uh Kenrick you would do your job like you say according to New York Times so on so according to few people have talked to right you're having your sources uh that's where actually we have some of background like in Academia also when you write a paper every sentence you write in the paper uh should be backed with the peer review citation to right so the same like like principles we have now how how would it be if we bed in that principle into an AI chat bot uh which otherwise would just say whatever it wants based on what it's memorized and its models and its weights this is how chat gbt launched so we took a different stat we said look when humans are interacting with these kind of mediums for their information access knowledge acces it's best if it's accurate as as accurate as possible and as real time as possible and the only way to do these two things is to make sure it behaves like a journalist or an academic almost like it always goes and does the background check and then comes back and writes the answer so that that's why it's uh it's it's a very fact-based answer answer engine the difference from Google is you just can converse with it and ask questions and feel like a natural conversation yeah so you're not let's say you're asking me questions right now you're not like asking in keywords right so that's a fundamental different word of interaction uh and uh we felt like the search Paradigm can finally change okay uh when people get used to this new way of asking questions uh I remember episode very viser like which is I was in this AWS Flagship conference called reinvent and a person from AWS was there next to me and he was like uh I'm pretty sure Jensen invested in cor and I corrected him hey Jensen did not invest in cor me Nvidia invested in no no no I'm pretty sure it was Jensen personally invested in for me I like I took up the perplexity app and just said who invested in Korey was it Jensen or Nvidia and perplexity gave me the answer in like 2 seconds how are people using that are they using it instead of Google are they using it in addition to Google so there are people use it in all sorts of ways some people use it as a replacement but that's not the majority that that becomes a narrative right and then of course there are Skeptics of the narrative there are believers in the narrative but there are our our success doesn't Ry on Google's failure at all like people can use Google and people can use perplexity at the same time all we need to do is pass the Larry Page toothbrush test which is Larry Page has his famous principle for like whether Google should decide to launch a product yeah is based on whether people can use it at least twice a day okay I think perplexity can is on the path to getting there like it's still not a product that every user of ours uses at least twice a day yeah but there's a path for us to getting there without those users having to stop using Google literally all they need to have is two deeper questions to ask because they can still use Google to like quickly get to some some Reddit or like some site some quick Amazon site or something like that right uh you don't have to use for blackx City for that if you're just navigating if you're just going to booking.com if you're just going to airbnb.com no need to come to us in fact it will be slower like our sources will render slower like instant 200 millisecond load time of Google is never going to be matched by us these deeper but if you want to know like how do I decide between Airbnb and rbo those are questions that we can answer I see I and what does usage look like right now about General about yeah we get like many millions of queries a day uh single digit millions of queries a day uh which is actually a big deal because when the first day we launched we only got 2,000 queries so since then we when did you uh December 7 2022 got it yeah a week after ch um year and a half yeah it's been like one year 3 months one year 4 months so uh we've been growing a lot in usage and that's also a norstar metric yeah I'll tell you why um tracking the number of users is not a big deal like somebody could have just come checked out your product and never came back but they checked out the product twice in a month or something like that uh actual number of queries is what most needed for you as a company because it tells you usage and it also creates the data fing for you you can go look at queries that people get wrong uh and like improve on them you can also like collect a bigger data set of like what pages are important for an a chb to be good at fact based question answering and um build like your your crawlers based on that right like prioritize the domains on the web the web is so big yeah you can never succeed at recreating the whole index like Google like it's too late starting two decades later right uh but what you can succeed at is only scrap parts of the web that are needed for day-to-day question answering so what does success look like to you then uh is it becoming a 20 billion company or are your Ambitions different than that uh I wouldn't say it's like based on a market cap uh it's more that like we want to change the Paradigm like user habits you change it that's the hardest thing right uh I think there's a saying that never bet against user habits uh so I think like we want to get to the Larry Page Benchmark like two two brush test for AI answer inance at least twice a day uh let's start with ones maybe I think it's even like less ambitious than that but um I think if ones Works a day the yeah we can go from there and uh we can really go far uh build new business models around this like innovate there I I want to think like Google is not just great for the search in Innovations right it's also the fact that AdWords is one of the greatest business models in human history with such high margins and and keeps on scaling us across practic scills what is the equivalent of that for AI answer Bots um nobody knows what AI do you use how do you use perplexity in your day-to-day and what other tools do you use so I use perplexity every day not just because uh I'm testing it all the time but you do it more than twice a day I I at least have like 20 queries a day 20 queries uh but but three or four are probably for testing yeah uh 10 probably just regular usage like today morning I looked up uh some stats on companies that are waste like more than $250 million in funding and like uh yesterday I looked up like history of all the funding rounds of Facebook like it's sort of the things that require you to open like six or seven different links take the information bits and pieces from everywhere and then Co it and summarize but the speed out which perplexity just gives me the answer is insane right uh so I and I used it a lot in the past like I I um proposed to my fiance then uh and then we had to look for a place that had a diamond Ling and an affordable l and then like I F say you propos using perplexity in some kind of way I I actually did use it and uh yes so so many other like like like uh like like when I was going in Jackson for um like like like winter uh wanted to find the right shoes that would didn't make me slip because I watched tons of YouTube videos where everybody scams in the shoes and uh you you just start slipping and I've had a bad history in the past of slipping in snow and so I I can ask very targeted queries of like what is good good and right so these are the kind of things is amazing for I think chat GPT I use it sometimes for the dolly TW feature uh if I'm making slides and I want some illustrations uh it's easy to just get it done uh my journey I used for some like you know Co iterating with my designer sometimes on generator like like like like brand design I actually don't use much for writing I actually write everything myself even now I don't like auto complete sty writing like uh it feels very unnatural the soft perplexity totally changed your your work for glass I use it more as a Search tool I still don't like using AI for writing dient so anything I write memos or messages I just write it myself got it well well thank you so much for the timein really enjoy talking thank you so with you yeah

Channel: Forbes

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Keywords: Forbes, Forbes Media, Forbes Magazine, Forbes Digital, Business, Finance, Entrepreneurship, Technology, Investing, Personal Finance, Perplexity, AI 50, Kenrick Cai, Aravind Srinivas, Google Search, Wikipedia, Internet Search Engine, SEO

Id: Sct_YUU40m4

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 11 2024