YouSaid · the spoken record

Aravind Srinivas

lines on the record
225
first
2024-06-19
most recent
2024-06-19
sittings or episodes
1
sources
podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

  1. “Maybe the long term business model of perplexity can make us profitable in a good company, but never as profitable in a cash cow as Google was. But you have to remember that it's still okay. Most companies don't even become profitable in their lifetime. Uber only achieved profitability recently, right? So I think the ad unit on perplexity, whether it exists or doesn't exist, it'll look very different from what Google has. The key thing to remember though is, you know, there's this code in the Art of War, like make the weakness of your enemy a strength. What is the weakness of Google? Is that any ad unit that's less profitable than a link? Any ad unit that Of dissent incentivizes the link click.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Yeah, so perplexity makes answer the first party characteristic of the site, right? Instead of links. So the traditional add unit on a link. Need to apply at perplexity. Maybe that's not a great idea. Maybe the add unit on a link might be the highest margin business model ever invented. But you also need to remember that for a new business that's trying to create for a new company that's trying to build its own sustainable business, you don't need to set out to build the greatest business of mankind. You can set out to build a good business and it's still fine.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “There are ways that Google prevents that. By tracking in general how many visits you get and also making sure that if you don't actually rank high on regular search results, but just being for the cost per click. You can be downloaded. So there are like many signals. It's not just one number I pay super high for that word and I just cam the results, but it can happen if you're pretty systematic about it. There are people who literally study this SEO and SEM and get a lot of data of so many different user queries from ad blockers and things like that and then use that to gain their site, use the specific words. It's like a whole industry.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “A reason for that. Let's say you're typing shoes and you see the ads. It's usually the good brands that are showing up as sponsored, but it's also because the good brands are the ones who have a lot of money and they pay the most for corresponding ad word. It's more a competition between those brands like Nike, Adidas, Allbirds, Brooks Under Armor all competing with each other for that AdWord. And so it's not like people overestimate how important it is to make that one brand decision on the shoe. Most of the shoes are pretty good at the top level. And often you buy based on what your friends are wearing and things like that. But Google benefits regardless of how you make your decision.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The actual transaction happens through them because of the click, and therefore they get to claim that you bought the transaction on your site happened through their referral. And then so you end up having to pay for it.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Actually, to be very fair, this motto was first conceived by Overture. And Google innovated a small change in the bidding system. Which made it even more mathematically robust, I mean, we can go into details later, but the main part is that they identified a great idea being done by somebody else. Really mapped it well onto like a search platform that was continually growing. And the amazing thing is they benefit from all other advertising done on the internet everywhere else. So you came to know about a brand through traditional CPM advertising. There is this view-based advertising. But then you went to Google to actually make the purchase. So they still benefit from it. So the brand awareness might have been created somewhere else.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “And there are a bunch of add words. You can actually go and look at this product called adwords.google.com where you get for certain adwords what's the search frequency per word. And you are bidding for your link to be ranked as high as possible for searches related to those adwords. So, the amazing thing is any click. You got through that bid, Google tells you that you got it through them. And if you get a good ROI in terms of conversions, like what people make more purchases on your site through the Google referral, then you're going to spend more. Forbidding against that word. And the price for each ad word is based on a bidding system, an auction system. So it's dynamic. So that way the margins are high.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “So, before I explain the Google AdWords model, let me start with a caveat that the company Google Are called alphabet makes money from so many other things. And so just because the ad model is under risk doesn't mean the company is under risk. For example, Sundar announced Google Cloud and YouTube together are on a hundred billion dollar annual recurring rate right now. So that alone should qualify Google as a trillion dollar company if you use a 10x multiplier and all that. So the company is not under any risk even if the search advertising revenue stops delivering. So let me explain the search advertising revenue FartNix. So the way Google makes money is it has the search engine. It's a great platform. It's the largest real estate of the internet. The most traffic is recorded per day.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “Know the models would get better, smarter, cheaper, more efficient, our index will get fresher, more up-to-date contents, more detailed snippets, and all of these, the hallucinations will drop exponentially. Of course, there's still going to be a long tale of hallucinations. You can always find some queries that perplexity is hallucinating on, but it'll get harder and harder to find those queries. And so we made a bet that this technology is going to exponentially improve and get cheaper. So, we would rather take a more dramatic position that the best way to actually make a dent in the search space is to not try to do what Google does, but try to do something they don't want to do for them to do this for every single query is a lot of money to be spent because their search volume is so much higher.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “In fact, when we first rolled out Perplexity, there was a healthy debate about whether we should still show the link as a side panel or something, because there might be cases where the answer is not good enough. Or the answer hallucinates, right? And so people are like, you know, you still have to show the link so that people can still go and click on them and read. They said, no. That was like okay, then you're going to have erroneous answers and sometimes answer is not even the right UI. I might want to explore. Sure, that's okay. You still go to Google and do that. We are betting on something that will improve over time.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “So we do not have to beat them, neither do we have to take them on. In fact, I feel the primary difference of perplexity from other startups that have explicitly laid out that they're taking on Google is that we never even try to play Google at their own game. If you're just trying to take on Google by building another 10 loading search engine, And with some other differentiation, which could be privacy or no ads or something like that, it's not enough. And it's very hard to make a real difference in just making a better Ten Blue Link search engine than Google. They have basically nailed this game for like 20 years. So the disruption comes from rethinking the whole UI itself. Why do we need links to be the prominent, occupying the prominent real estate of the search engine UI? Flip that.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Lot more, definitely. I mean, but personalization, there's an 80-20 here. The 80-20 is achieved with... Your location, let's say your gener. All that can already give you a great personalized experience. Don't have to have infinite memory. Infinite context windows have access to every single activity you've done. That's an overkill.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “Yeah, exactly, but you would like the product when you ask for weather. Let's say it localizes you to Austin automatically and not just tell you it's hot, not just tell you it's humid, but also tells you what to wear. You didn't ask for what to wear, but it would be amazing if the product came and told you what to wear.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “And the information needs to be presented well. And the user intent, like for example, if you ask for a stock price, you might even be interested in looking at the historic stock price, even though you never ask for it. You might be interested in today's price. These are the kind of things that you have to build as custom UIs for every query. And why I think this is a hard problem. It's not just the next generation model will solve the previous generation model's problems here. The next generation model will be smarter. You can do these amazing things like planning, like query, breaking it down to pieces, collecting information, aggregating from sources, using different tools, those kind of things you can do. You can keep answering harder and harder queries, but there's still a lot of work to do on the product layer in terms of how the information is best presented to the user and how you think backwards from what the user”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Exactly. Because that's not just about throwing an LLM. When you're asking, oh, what dress should I wear out today in Austin, you do want to get the weather across the time of the day, even though you didn't ask for it. And Google presents this information in cool widgets. And I think that is where this is a very different problem from just building another chat bot.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “Exactly. So that's what David Dorchay's in his book, which is for creation of new knowledge starts from the spark of curiosity to seek explanations. And then you find new phenomenon or you get more depth and whatever knowledge you already have.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “There's no end to knowledge. You can only expand and grow. That's the whole concept of the beginning of infinity book by David Dosh. You always seek new knowledge. So I see this as sort of a discovery process. Let's say literally whatever you ask me to right now, you could have asked perplexity too. Hey, perplexity. Is it a search engine or is it an answer engine or what is it? And then like you see some questions at the bottom, right?”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “I think of perplexity as a knowledge discovery engine. Neither a search engine, of course we call it an answer engine, but everything matters here. The journey doesn't end once you get an answer. In my opinion, the journey begins after you get an answer. You see related questions at the bottom, suggested questions to ask. Why? Because maybe the answer was not good enough, or the answer was good enough, but you probably want to dig deeper and ask more. Why in the search bar we say where knowledge begins?”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “There are so many standards for what counts as notable and not. So he decided this is worth working on. And it's not just a problem that will be solved by a smarter model because there's so many other things to do on the search layer and the sources layer and making sure how well the answer is formatted and presented to the user. So that's why the product exists.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “Now, sounds like problem solved, except we didn't even know whether what it said was correct or not. And in fact, we're saying incorrect things. We were like, okay, how do we address this problem? And we remembered our academic roots. Dennis and myself were both academics. Dennis is my co-founder. And we said, okay, what is one way we stop ourselves from saying nonsense in a peer review paper? We're always making sure we can cite what it says, what we write every sentence. Now, what if we asked the chatbot to do that? And then we realized that's literally how Wikipedia works. In Wikipedia, if you do a random edit, people expect you to actually have a source for that, not just any random source. They expect you to make sure that the source is notable.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “I didn't even know anything who were the providers. What is co insurance or deductible or like none of these made any sense to me? And you go to Google, insurance is a category where a major ad spend category. So even if you ask for something, Google has no incentive to give you clear answers. They want you to click on all these links and read for yourself because all this insurance providers are bidding just get your attention. So we integrated a Slack bot that just pings GPT 3.5 and answered a question.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “Never built a product before, never built a startup before. Of course, we had worked on a lot of cool engineering research problems. But doing something from scratch is the ultimate test. And there were lots of questions What is the health insurance the first employee we hired? He came and asked us for health insurance Normal need. I didn't care. I was like, Do I need a health insurance company that is like, who cares My other two co-founders had were married, so they had health insurance to their spouses. But this guy was like looking for health insurance.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “Correct. When I wrote my first paper, the senior people who were working with me on the paper told me this one profound thing, which is that every sentence you write in a paper. Should be backed with a citation, with a citation from another peer-reviewed paper or an experimental result in your own paper. Anything else that you say in the paper is more like an opinion. It's a very simple statement but pretty profound in how much it forces you to say things that are only right. And we took this principle and asked ourselves. Is the best way to make chatbots accurate? Force it to only say things that it can find on the internet. And find from multiple sources This kind of came out of a need rather than, oh, let's try this idea. When we started the startup, there were like so many questions all of us had because we were complete noobs.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “It's been instructed to do so, it's been instructed that one particular instruction of given a bunch of links and paragraphs, write a concise answer for the user with the appropriate citation. So the magic is all of this working together in one single orchestrated product. And that's what we build perplexity for.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Perplexity is best described as an answer engine. So you ask it a question, you get an answer, except the differences, all the answers are backed by sources. Is like how an academic writes a paper. Now that referencing part, the sourcing part, is where the search engine part comes in. So you combine traditional search, extract results relevant to the query the user asked. You read those links, extract the relevant paragraphs, feed it into an LLM. LLM means large language model. And that LLM takes the relevant paragraphs, looks at the query, and comes up with a well-formatted answer with appropriate footnotes to resentance it says.”

    2024-06-19 · Lex Fridman Podcast · #434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source