Prediction Not checkable as stated
Srinivas: Google will lose its single search monopoly in the conversational era
“And in that era, I don't think Google is going to be the one single monopoly because they're already like far behind in this interface.”
Opinion
Srinivas: Google is making a mistake chasing OpenAI with Gemini
“Hence why, like, you know, I actually think Google is making a big mistake by trying to do whatever OpenAI is doing, right, like, going after them with the large, oh, I'm not, they're having GPT-IV, I'm going to turn Gemini.”
Opinion
Srinivas: Building a web search index is harder than competing with GPT-4
“We believe that building your own index is even harder than trying to compete with GPT-IV because it's not a problem that's just solved with money.”
Disclosure
Srinivas: Perplexity will not crawl websites that block web crawlers
“Yeah, I mean, like, if they don't want to be crawled, we shouldn't crawl them. You know, that's just being how the internet has worked. Like, you know, people have the robots, the text file, and like, you know, if they don't let you do it, then you should just…”
Opinion
Srinivas: Citing web sources in AI search constitutes legal fair use
“And it's actually fair use. The fact that you're attributing credit is fair use.”
Insight
Incumbents will dominate text-to-SQL, making it a bad startup problem
“The bigger companies, like Databricks or Snowflake might build these tools and offer it on their sequel editor or, like, some kind of, like, you know, assistant And that could probably solve the problem. It's not a great problem for a startup to work on.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Srinivas: Conversational AI will replace 10 blue links in 5-10 years
“If you have like deeper, more complex questions with five or 10 years from now, like you're not going to consume 10 blue links. It's going to be a chat bot or a system that you just ask questions like how you would ask another person.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Srinivas: AI search will not be dominated by the largest model
“This is not a problem that will be dominated by the company with the largest language model.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Srinivas: Next major AI jump will come from self-teaching models
“At some point, like we lost saturated on data that, that exists on the internet. That's interesting enough for models to keep improving on that. The next big capability jump is probably going to come from the models teaching themselves.”
Assertion Supported
Srinivas: Open-source AI models do not match closed-source model capabilities
“That needs the open source models or fine tuned versions of them to match the closed source, the closed ones. And That's not the case today.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Srinivas: Self-hosting open-source LLMs is more expensive than closed-source APIs
“Even if there exists a checkpoint today, that's as good as the close models. It's still not an incentive to use them and serve them yourself because you're going to burn more money than paying for the close ones because the close ones are being served in such …”
Insight
Srinivas: Consumer AI products shouldn't expect users to be prompt engineers
“If you wanna take AI and like Make it like be widely accessible and like regularly used by every person in the world. You shouldn't expect people to be great prompt engineers. You should work on the user's behalf and try to understand their underlying intent a…”
Disclosure
Srinivas: Perplexity rejected CoreWeave due to high pricing
“Yeah, we don't use Corby because we decoded a very high pricing to us and like we decided not to use them.”
Opinion
Srinivas: Perplexity does not believe in OpenAI's plugin vision
“We don't believe in the OpenAI plugins vision.”
Insight
Srinivas: Reliable AI user experiences require full internal orchestration
“Our vision is like at this point, like today, or like maybe the next year, The reliability that you want for a great consumer experience requires you to like do the whole orchestration yourself and not rely on like developers to do it for you.”
Assertion Partly supported
Srinivas: Jasper and Copy.ai initially generated more revenue than OpenAI
“News started spreading that there were companies like Jasper and copy.ai that started making more money than even OpenAI at the time.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Srinivas: Stable Diffusion and Midjourney likely generated more revenue than DALL-E 2
“Similarly, like, Stable Diffusion and Midjourney were all, like, pretty competitive with Dolly too, and actually probably making more money than Dolly too.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Perplexity AI reaches millions of MAUs and millions of daily queries
“We have a lot of millions of monthly active users and millions of daily queries.”
Insight
Srinivas: Building a web search index requires active user traffic
“Without people using a product, there's no way to build an index.”
Disclosure
Perplexity CEO: Perplexity won't train open-source models, will serve them
“We are not the ones building these open source models because that requires a lot more capital. But we want to, like, make sure anybody can access them easily. So we are democratizing the access to them through our APIs, through our labs, and, like, you can co…”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Srinivas: GitHub Copilot gained hundreds of thousands of paying users day one
“GitHub Copilot when they moved away from the waitlist to the paid version, they just had like hundreds of thousands of people paying from the first day.”
Aravind Srinivas