Srinivas: No AI product has in-app network effects yet
Aravind Srinivas · Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search · Y Combinator · Jul 11, 2025 · at 24:06
Aravind Srinivas (CEO of Perplexity) explains to YC's David Lieb why current AI chatbots lack switching costs and product defensibility compared to communication apps like WhatsApp.
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“No AI product has within app network effect. Like it's not like WhatsApp where if you build a WhatsApp rival, Meta has a definitely like a questionable brand, right? Like people don't necessarily trust Meta's products. They think like these are ad products. Despite that, nobody's able to switch up WhatsApp that easily, because there's all your contacts, your groups, everything's there. AI doesn't quite have that yet, mainly because you can easily export your ChatGPT history, upload it somewhere else, or, ah, things like that.”
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