My guest today is Aravind Srinivas. He is the founder and CEO of Perplexity, a startup that he describes as an “answer engine” built from scratch with AI. Aravind has set out for perplexity to become the most powerful answer engine backed by up-to-date sources. He helps me pick the technology apart, describing the behind the scenes of what it takes to build Perplexity to reach its potential and compete alongside the likes of Google and OpenAI. Our conversation goes deep into programming this type of infrastructure, the competition around latency, and constructing a business model around deep learning. There is so much on this horizon, so please enjoy my conversation with Aravind Srinivas.

Listen to Founders Podcast

For the full show notes, transcript, and links to mentioned content, check out the episode page here.

-----

This episode is brought to you by Tegus, the only investment research platform built for fundamental investors. How hard do you work to get the insights you need to make a great investment decision? How many hours do you spend digging through public records and expert transcripts, or manually updating complex models? Investors should compete on their ability to analyze investments, not how well they aggregate data. That’s why Tegus offers a unified, end-to-end research platform that combines robust qualitative content sets, up-to-date financial data, management and culture checks, and more — all in the same easy-to-use, streamlined user experience. 95% of the top 20 global private equity firms use Tegus. Shouldn’t you? Learn more and get your free trial at tegus.com/patrick.

-----

Invest Like the Best is a property of Colossus, LLC. For more episodes of Invest Like the Best, visit joincolossus.com/episodes.

Past guests include Tobi Lutke, Kevin Systrom, Mike Krieger, John Collison, Kat Cole, Marc Andreessen, Matthew Ball, Bill Gurley, Anu Hariharan, Ben Thompson, and many more.

Stay up to date on all our podcasts by signing up to Colossus Weekly, our quick dive every Sunday highlighting the top business and investing concepts from our podcasts and the best of what we read that week. Sign up here.

Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com).

Show Notes:

(00:00:00) Welcome to Invest Like the Best

(00:04:08) First Question - Redefining 'Great' in Search

(00:07:16) The Mechanics of Perplexity

(00:10:59) The Evolution of Perplexity From Wrapper to Robust Infrastructure

(00:13:19) The Future of Large Language Models (LLMs)

(00:22:39) Aravind's Strategy For Constructing The Business Model

(00:28:16) The Process of Building an Index for a Search Engine

(00:35:55) The Impact of Scaling and Data Quality on AI Models

(00:40:00) Bottlenecks in AI Development

(00:47:06) The Talent Landscape in AI

(00:57:59) The Vision for the Future of Search

(01:00:19) Importance of Execution in AI Startups

Manchester United’s FA Cup Win, Erik Ten Hag & The Championship Playoff Final

The Rest Is Football

Introduction

The AI-powered Podcast Player