The Best Way to Disrupt Google Is to Make Search Work on a Glass

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I was always interested in coming up with a company that wanted to do search. The first ever idea, pitched to our seed investor, Elon Gill, was like, the best way to disrupt Google is to make search work on a glass. So I wanted to do entrepreneurship. For a long time, AI was just an academic thing. It was becoming hotter and hotter. But it was still considered, oh, this is cool research. Things started changing in 2022. GitHub co-pilot happened. When they announced that it's a paid version, a lot of people signed up on day zero. And then I also heard about Jasper making a ton of revenue. Like, you know, so

We talked to Aravind Srinivas about competing with the tech giants, Perplexity's product philosophy and obsession with maximizing value delivered to the user per unit time, and the features that makes Perplexity unique.

We're hiring across the board at Turpentine and for Erik's personal team on other projects he's incubating. He's hiring a Chief of Staff, EA, Head of Special Projects, Investment Associate, and more. For a list of JDs, check out: eriktorenberg.com.

(0:00) Preview

(1:31) Introduction & Context

(08:06) Aravind’s vision for Perplexity as the world’s most truth-centric company

(9:29) Raising the average IQ of the world

(12:00) Aravind’s favorite tech entrepreneur

(15:12) “Anthropics” - Building your own model vs user experience

(33:00) Why is perplexity free

(43:00) Talking shop: Perplexity’s tech stack and speed

(1:06:00) Perplexity’s stance on guardrails on search

(1:19:48) Forecasting weakly general AGI: The four criteria

(1:28:00) Aravind’s perspective on OpenAI and the future of AGI

(1:39:00) The Cognitive Revolution’s rapid fire questions: Neuralink implant? Most used AI tools? AI hopes and fears?

Twitter handles:

@CogRev_Podcast

@AravSrinivas (Aravind)

@labenz (Nathan)

@eriktorenberg (Erik)

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References & Shownotes:

Flamingo: https://www.deepmind.com/blog/tackling-multiple-tasks-with-a-single-visual-language-model

Decision Transformer Paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/2106.01345

Aravind on TalkRL Podcast: https://www.talkrl.com/episodes/aravind-srinivas-2

Weakly General AGI Criteria: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/date-weakly-general-ai-is-publicly-known/

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