Denis Yarats

Co-founder & CTO, Perplexity AI · 1 appearance on the record.

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founderexecutivescientistengineerinvestor@denisyarats ↗LinkedIn ↗perplexity.ai ↗Wikipedia ↗

Denis Yarats co-founded Perplexity AI, a conversational AI answer engine providing synthesized search responses with citations. He previously worked as an AI research scientist at Facebook AI Research and as a machine learning engineer at Quora.

8statements → 1claims → 0claims resolved → 3.62/5average certainty → 2.62/5average debate potential →

1 not checkable as stated how the 1 claim stands · each chip opens the sources

1 prediction · 2 opinions · 4 insights · 1 disclosure · every statement was checked. The prediction and assertions are the 1 claim: statements the public record can support or contradict. 0 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Denis argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Denis Yarats on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

What they said8 Episodes1

Everything Denis Yarats said on No Priors that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Opinion

Denis Yarats says sacrificing work-life balance is required to beat competition

“It's kind of like work life balance, maybe not the ideal but you know, but that's the only way to sort of like beat competition and sort of like iterate very fast and do great things.”

Denis Yarats Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 7:31 No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

Insight

Yarats: The best AI research breakthroughs came from top software engineers

“Turns out through my experience, the best research scientists, also very good engineers, like very good engineers. And we've noticed like through DeepMind and OpenAI is just like the companies that made the most progress over like last six years or five years …”

Denis Yarats Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 11:07 No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

Opinion

Denis Yarats argues AI answer engines fundamentally break Google's monetization model

“And it's also kind of like why we believe my, it might be very hard for Google to fully launch this system. Like answer engine, because it just like breaks monetization strategy for them.”

Denis Yarats Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 27:34 No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Yarats: AI search monetization will feature fewer but more expensive clicks

“So there is gonna be few, few clicks, but each click is gonna be more expensive.”

Denis Yarats Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 28:21 No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

Insight

Yarats: Aspiring AI researchers should work in industry before a PhD

“I think it's best to not go to PhD right after undergrad and kind of like spend at least like couple of years in industry. I think that goes to my point to me, like the best researchers are those who can, who are also very good engineers.”

Denis Yarats Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 37:20 No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

Insight

Yarats: Perplexity prefers raw drive over extensive experience when hiring

“Personally, I would rather like get somebody who has this Burning desire to work on these things rather than somebody who already has a lot of experience and not going to put a lot of, or like as much effort as other people.”

Denis Yarats Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 5:17 No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

Insight

Yarats: Rejection sampling significantly boosts LLM quality before full RLHF

“Full blown, like RLHF is, you know, definitely something we're going to look into that, but there is like several many steps that you can have in between that significantly can increase your quality. So for example, I mean like even using something like a reje…”

Denis Yarats Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 20:17 No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

Disclosure

Yarats: Perplexity built unreleased Twitter, Salesforce, and HubSpot integrations early on

“Even though we're like six months or like seven months old company, we actually built so many things. We had like, you know, Twitter, we had like a Salesforce integration. We have like HubSpot integration, like many other things that we never like released.”

Denis Yarats Apr 25, 2023 ▶ 14:40 No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
No Priors Ep. 9 \| With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats	Apr 25, 2023	7m

Denis Yarats

The record, in short

How they sound: not measured why? →

Appearances (1)

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