Perplexity

“We're not gonna, like, spend all our bandwidth building data centers and chips and, like, trying to just talk about, like, breaking the most reason coding a math benchmark.”

“And then we released the ability to ask follow-up questions. That doubled the engagement time on the site, and also increased the number of questions every day, and the number of people, number of questions every day was increasing exponentially.”

“There's one way of doing these things where we go to each of these domains and like try to build an index of it and put it into specific formats like tables and then have the LLM, like read that. In a structured language of SQL, or you could do the other way w…”

“Twitter. The pre-Elon CEO moments academic access was allowed, legal, so we built a database of Twitter. We organized it in the form of tables. We tried to do it with the OpenAI codex models. This was even pre-GPT-III. We wrote a lot of templates.”

“Most of the follow-up queries actually we see are, like, completely irrelevant to the first query, because they just want to keep continuing the session.”

“We had written the same paper a day apart, so we knew each other, and he was a visiting student in my lab”

“Well, it's beginning to happen already a little bit, right? We're not as fast as we used to be. I think some of it is not because of people. It's also because things breaking in production, people start losing trust in the product.”

“They cannot make this exact product on the Google homepage. It's so hard to know when a query is purely informational or not, and then the Google search page is already, like, so cluttered, that's the answer box, the knowledge panel,”

“That sort of router, that, that orchestrator, I think that's the hardest thing to build, and whoever builds that, and can operate that at a scale of billion users, and also knows how to monetize, like, some of those queries really well, is going to be the next…”

“They're actually powering the customer support for Perplexity and Replit and Bolt and a bunch of other like top AI companies now.”

“And agents can only be built with a browser. I, I'm very, like, convinced about that vision, that if you want to have a mobile agent, That you can actually build and implement without being restricted by whatever OS rules that Apple or Google sets in terms of …”

“We made it mandatory to use at least one AI coding tool, and internally at perplexity it happens to be cursor and like a mix, mix of cursor and GitHub Copilot. But yeah, we definitely made it compulsory.”

“The same feature is being launched year after year after year with a different name, with a different VP, with a different group of people, but it's the same thing. Except maybe it's getting better, but it's never getting launched to everybody.”

“Yeah, we have about 200.”

“We think about it as an assistant rather than a complete autonomous agent, but one omnibox where you can navigate, you can ask informational queries, and you can give agentic tasks, and your AI with you on your new tab page, on your sidecar as an assistant on …”

“We focus on speed, time to first token on app or web, like we're still the fastest despite doing search.”

“We already work with self book. They power all the hotel bookings natively done on perplexity. We work at TripAdvisor to surface all the reviews of hotels and Different, you know, places. We have, like, collaborations for the maps. We work with Yelp. We also, …”

“The browser is much harder to copy than, like yet another chat tool.”

“OpenAI has perplexity within ChatGPT that did not kill any of these companies.”

“We think, like, we can grow at least, you know, a few billions a year in just subs, which is a great business.”

“We launched it seven days after the ChatGPT launch, especially at a time when ChatGPT did not have web search.”

“Now there are things that don't have one clear accurate answer. I think they're the best thing we can do is offer all the perspectives. And not really take a clear opinion on like what is right and wrong when there's no clear answer to that question.”

“Well, whether you believe it or not, like, I have infra issues every day, so there are a lot of people using it, and this usage is actually growing to the extent that we don't actually know how to deal with it. We have to rebuild the infra to scale the next NX…”

“So we bet on the fact that language models can do all the reasoning and parsing and like structuring later, but the more important thing is to start with something more unstructured, and that ended up becoming perplexity.”

“And the only mode you have is speed. You have to innovate. You have to move faster than everybody else.”

“ChatGPT is the most successful consumer AI product out there, and so competing against it is very difficult, which is why I really want to, like, push the company more on the browser side, and I think Comet, the browser, will be an abstraction layer about chat…”

“The browser. That's the big bet we are making as far as the future of the company goes.”

“We started the company without actually having clear idea of what to build, which is the opposite of what YC advice is, which is start from a project and turn it into a company.”

“The first kind of obvious tip is don't get locked in with a provider and don't compete with the AI labs. The AI labs ship, right? And so does companies like Perplexity and others. And so I think you want to be really clear and honest to yourself where you're a…”

“Personally, I found it was better than all the other tools for that, and it was better than Perplexity on it, too. Like, Perplexity would be fast, but not always accurate, and Gemini was not quite as fast as Perplexity, but was always pretty accurate if I aske…”

“I'll use perplexity for fast web searches or things that you know, I know is like a research task because I think ChatGPT is still like a little bit of a step behind for searching the web.”