Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, discusses how the early commercial traction of generative AI application companies inspired him to leave research and start a company.
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.”