Dmitry Shevelenko (CBO of Perplexity) explains internal company productivity gains using agentic tools to Alex Kantrowitz on Big Technology Podcast.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Shevelenko: Computer-using AI agents were impossible before late 2025
“You couldn't have built something like computer before November, December of last year, because model capabilities advance where you can have longer time horizons for running tasks, right? Where you're not just answering a question, but you're actually doing W…”
Prediction Open · timeframe May 2031
Shevelenko: Codex and proprietary AI assistants will never run rival models
“So the one thing that Codex is never going to be able to support is running Gemini models. You know, they will always be in the GPT family. Same thing for, you know, Claude, like they're not gonna, you know, have GPT models. Gemini is not gonna have Grok model…”
Disclosure
Shevelenko: AI labs aggressively petition Perplexity to use their models
“They aggressively petition us to use their models. They want, they give us early access. They want us to run evals. And so we have, you know, the exact opposite dynamic right now where they're, you know, more than happy to take revenue from us.”
Disclosure
Shevelenko: Perplexity hosts and post-trains Chinese open-source models in US data centers
“We never Integrate into perplexity any product that, or API that is hosted in China. We have ourselves post-trained. We have post-trained open source models. That, that come that are developed by Chinese labs. We run those in US data centers. We post-train the…”
Insight
Shevelenko: AI pricing will resemble Costco with memberships and compute credits
“AI is going to become a lot like Costco where you pay for the membership, right? And that gets you in the store. And that's actually the part of Costco's business that is, you know, the highest margin. And then you have, you know, everything you're buying in t…”
Disclosure
Shevelenko: Perplexity has a blossoming partnership with Apple using Mac minis
“We have a great blossoming partnership with Apple. They actually are really excited about what we're doing with personal computer and how it uses Mac minis.”