YouSaid · the spoken record

OpenAI CEO

lines on the record: 55
first: 2025-07-17
most recent: 2025-07-17
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

“I hope it becomes the one tool you think of when you want to actually get anything done. And it has a lot of deep connection to you because it synchronizes with all your context and proactively things on your behalf and truly makes your life a lot easier.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely, it's inevitable. We want to do it before the IPO. And we think we can IPO in 2028 or 9. I would like to IPO, by the way, just to be clear. I don't want to stay private forever like some of the companies have chosen to do so. Even though it gives you advantages in M&As and like decision-making power, I do think the publicity and the marketing you get from an IPO and the fact that people can finally invest in a search alternative to Google is a pretty massive opportunity for us to IPO. But I don't think it makes sense to IPO before hitting like a billion dollars in revenue and some profitability along the way. So that's definitely something we want to get to in the next four years or three years. But I don't want to stunt our own growth and not be aggressive in trying new things today.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it does feel like that's something labs need to work on, which is truly like aligning people on one mission, that like money alone is not the motivator for them. And is the company, your company's doing well, like, you know, the stock is going up and you feel dopamine from working there every day and you're encountering new kind of challenges. You feel a lot of growth. You're learning new things. And you're getting richer too along the way. Why would you want to go and just because you have some guaranteed payments?”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, it's definitely going to feel like a transfer market now, right? Like with NBA or something. There's going to be a few individual stars who are having so much leverage. One thing I've noticed is anthropic researchers are not the ones getting poached.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Are huge Definitely, I was surprised by the magnitude of the numbers. Seems like it's needed at this point for them. But at the same time, Elon and Nixay have shown you don't need to spend that much to train models competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic. So I don't know if money alone solves every problem here. You do need to have a team that works well together, has a proper mission alignment and milestones in some sense failure is not an option for them. The amount of investment is so big and I feel like the way Zach probably thinks is, and I'm going to get all the people, I'm going to get all the compute and I'm going to get all the milestones set up for you guys. But now it's all on you to execute. And if you fail, it's going to look pretty bad on me. So you better not fail. That's probably the deal.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Zucker's awesome. Like, he's doing a lot of awesome things. And I think Meta has such a sticky product. It's fantastic. And we look at that as an example of like, you know, it's possible to build a large business without having any platform yourself.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, I'm firstly honored by Eddie mentioning us in the trial as a product that he likes and he's heard from his circles that people like it. I would love to work with Apple on integrations with Safari or Siri or Apple intelligence. It's the one product that almost everybody loves using or it's a status symbol. Like everybody wants to graduate using an Apple device. I'm pretty sure that we share a lot of design aesthetics in terms of how we do things and how they do things. At the same time, my goal is to make perplexity as big as possible. It's definitely possible that this browser is so platform agnostic that it can benefit Android and iOS ecosystems, Windows and Mac ecosystems. And we can be pretty big on our own, just like Google was. Of course, Google owns Android. But you could imagine they would have been pretty successful.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the beginning, we're going to do more word of mouth growth. It's very powerful. It's worked out well for us in the past with Percy itself. And we're going to try to follow the same trajectory here. And luckily we have an installed base of perplexity already of like, you know, 30 to 40 million people. So even if we get a good chunk of those people to try out Comet and convert some of those people who tried it into setting it as default, it'll already be a massive victory without relying on any distribution partnerships. And then we're obviously going to try seeing how to convert that progress into a partnership like Google has with a bunch of people. I just want to caveat by saying it's going to be extremely hard. We've spoken about this in the past where Google makes sure every Android phone has Google Chrome as the default browser. And you cannot change that. You lose a lot of money if you change that.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I haven't tried it myself. I've seen what other people have said. I think they have some interesting ideas on the visuals in the front end. If I were them, I would have just tried it in the same browser they had instead of going and trying to build distribution on a new one. But yeah, it's interesting. We're definitely going to study every product out there. And our focus, though, more goes on to Chrome is the big brother. And the way I think about it is even if I take 1% of the Chrome users set the default as Comet as a massive, massive win for us and a massive loss for them too, by the way, because any ad revenue loss is massive at that scale.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, there will be standalone apps for both. Some people are going to use the standalone Comet app just like how they use Chrome or Safari, and it's okay. They probably won't do that because it's going to have an AI that you can talk to on every webpage, including in voice mode, actually. But you still want to just navigate and get to a website quickly. Like I just want to go and browse verge without actually having any quest in my mind. That's fine. And I could go to Perplexity and have all the other things the app has like discover feeds and spaces and like just a quick fast answers without the web interface. That's fine too. And we're going to support like a packaged version of the browser comet within the perplexity app, just like how the Google app still supports navigation like Chrome. So by the way, both the Google app and the Chrome app are WebKit apps on iOS. Similarly, both the Google app and the Chrome app”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It'll give you like four or five links if it feels like it's a navigational query, it'll give you images pretty quickly, it'll give you a very short answer also. So you can combine informational queries or navigational queries, agent queries in like one single search box. That is only doable if you actually are working on the search problem, which we've been working on since the last two and a half years, right? So I don't see it as two separate things. Basically, you cannot build a product like Chrome without building Google. Similarly, you cannot build a product like Comet without building perplexity.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I don't know if they are. I've read the same leaks that you have, and it was very interesting. It came two hours after we launched. But I would say... You also made another point about perplexity being ignored and comment being the next thing. I don't see it that way because you cannot build a browser without a search. A lot of people praise the comet browser because it doesn't feel like another browser. You know why? One of the main reasons is, of course, we have the sidecar and we have the agent and all that, but the search default search is perplexity. And we made it in a way where even if you're having an intent to navigate, it'll understand that.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“A more sticky product, and it's the only way to build agents. It's the only way to build end-to-end workflows. It's the only way to build true personalization, memory, and context. And so it's a bigger price, in my opinion, than trying to nail the chat game, especially in a market that's so fragment. And so much harder problem to crack to, both in terms of intelligence, how you package it, how you can't ex-engineer it, how you deal with all the shortcomings at the current moment, as well as like end user-facing UX, which could be the front end, the back end, the security, privacy, and all the other bugs that you get to deal with when working with a much more multifaceted product like the browser.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I wouldn't say that I'm betting on it because the chat GPT race is over. Let me decouple the two things. The chatbot does seem like it's over in the sense that it's very unlikely that people think of another product for day-to-day chat. The beginning, we never competed on that market. We were always competing on search. We were trying to reimagine search in the conversational style. Yes, every chatba has search integrations. Some people like that. Some people still like a more search-like interface that we have. So we never wanted to go after that market and we're not competing there either. Google is trying to catch up and Grox trying to catch up. Meta is trying to catch up. But I feel like all that is wasted labor, in my opinion, at this point. The way I would phrase it is The browser is bigger than chat.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In bulk to an AI that goes and does it reliably, it almost becomes like your personal AWS cluster with natural language described tasks. And I think we have to execute on it. But if we do execute on it and if the reasoning models are continuing to work well, you could imagine something that feels more like clot code for life. And clock code is a product that people are paying thousand bucks a month also because even though it's expensive it helps you maybe get a promotion faster because you're getting more work done and your salary goes up and it feels like the ROI is there.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Ads done by similar brands, pull that, study that, or like look at the adverts pricing of 100 different keywords and figure out how to price your thing competitively. These are tasks that could definitely save you the hours and hours and maybe even give you an arbitrage over what you could do yourself because AI is able to do a lot more. At scale, if it helps you to make a few million bucks, does it not make sense to spend like $2,000 for that prompt? It does, right? I think we are going to be able to monetize in many more interesting ways than chatbots for the browser. It's still early, but the signs of life are already there in terms of what kind of use cases people have. And if you map reduce your cognitive labor.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think if the reliability of these agents gets good enough, You could imagine people paying usage based pricing. You might not be part of the max subscription tier of like $200 a month or anything, but there's like one task you really desperately want to get done and you don't want to spend like three hours doing that. As long as the agent actually completes and you're like satisfied with the response rate, the success rate, you'll be okay with trusting the agent to paying an advance fee of like $20 and for the recruiting task I described, like give me all the Stanford alumni who worked at Anthropic. I think that is a very interesting way of thinking about it, which is otherwise going to cost you a lot more time or you have to like hire a sourcing consultant or you have to hire a full-time sourcer whose only job is that if you value your time, you're going to pay for it. Maybe like let me give you another example. You want to put an ad on meta, right? Instagram and you kind of want to look at”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We're On Comet as a business, it's very compute intensive and it still invite only. I imagine you wish you could just throw the gates open and let anyone use it, but it would melt your servers or your AWS bills, right? So how do you scale this thing? Not only do you scale it from the product sense and it becoming a thing that normal people can easily use and understand that curve of learning that we talked about, but also just the business of it. You're not profitable, you're venture-backed, you have to make money one day, you have to be profitable. How do you scale something like this that is actually even more compute intensive than a chatbot?”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm actually bearish on that. Going to be difficult to create your own presence by just playing the old playbook. You got to build your brand through a different manner in this time period. And the existing ones who are lucky enough to already have a big brand presence, they have to maintain the brand also with a different playbook, not just doing a CEO or traditional search engine growth tactics.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I actually think if you have a brand People are going to be interested in knowing what that brand thinks. And it might go to you, the individual, or it might go to Werge, or it might go to both. Doesn't matter, right? So even within Werge, I may not be interested in articles written by some other people. I may be interested in specific people who like data content or something. So I think the brand will play an even bigger role in a world where both AIs and humans are surfing the web. And so I don't think it's going to go away. Maybe the traffic for you might not even come organically. It might come through social media. Like let's say you publish a new article. Some people might come click on it through Instagram or X or LinkedIn. Doesn't matter, right? And whether it be possible for a new platform to build traffic from scratch by just doing the good old SEO tricks.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But one server and another server. But it's still not solving the problem of the reasoning and knowing what information to extract and knowing what actions to take and all that chaining together different steps, trying things when things don't work. Whereas the browsers basically something that's been designed for humans to actually operate in and extracting the DOM and knowing what actions to take are seems to be something that these models, the reasoning models seem to be pretty good at. So we're going to do a hybrid approach and see what works best. At the end, it has to be fast. It has to be reliable and it has to be cheap. So if MCP lets us do that better than the browsing agent, then we'll do that, right? Like there's no dogmatic vision here.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. I think there's going to be some good MCP connectors that we'll definitely integrate with, like linear or notion. I guess GitHub has an MCP connector. So whenever it makes sense to use those over an agent that just opens these tabs and scrolls through them and clicks on things, we're going to use that. But it's always going to be bottlenecked by how well these servers are maintained and how you kind of like orchestrate these agents to use the protocol in the right way. It doesn't solve the search problem on those servers, by the way. You still have to go and figure out what data to retrieve. You define it as the orchestration layer. It's not the orchestration layer. It's just the protocol for communicating between servers and the client.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I got tired of that, and like we felt like the browser is a great way to do that today. MCP is going to definitely play a contributing factor to agents, to the field in the next five years. There's still a lot of security issues they need to figure out there. Having authentication tokens communicated from your client to an MC server or from remote MCP server to another client, all these things are pretty risky today. way more risky than just having your persistent logins on your client on the browser same issues exist with the operator which try to create like server-side versions of all your apps is it open ai”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'm not like extremely bearish on MCP. I just wanted to mature more. And I don't want to wait. I want to ship agents right now I feel like AI as a community, as an industry, has just been talking about agents for the last two years and no one has actually shipped anything that worked.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We started this conversation talking about how you think the browser gives you this context to be able to create an actually useful agent. And there's this other technical path that the industry is looking at and getting excited about, which is MCP, model context protocol. And at a high level, it's just this orchestration layer that lets an LLM talk to Airtable, Google Docs, whatever, and do things on your behalf in the same way that comet is doing that in the sidebar. You're going at this problem through the browser and through the logged in state of the browser that you talked about and that shortcut. While a lot of people anthropic and others, OpenAI are looking at MCP is maybe the way that agents actually get built at scale. I'm curious what you think of those two paths and are you just very bearish on MCP or do you think MCP is for other kinds of companies?”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“These are things that already work well. And this is already a massive value add over Chrome. And once they several minutes worth long Horizon Tasks start working reliably, that's going to make it feel more than just a browser. That's when you make it feel like an OS. You'll want everything in that one container and you'll feel like the rest of the computer doesn't even matter.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I can take a look at it. You can share the link with me. But I would say Majority of the advertised use cases that we ourselves advertise are things that are expected to work. Now will it always like 100% of the time work in a deterministic way? No. Are we going to get there in a matter of months? I think so. You kind of have to be timing yourself where you're not exactly waiting for the moment where everything works reliably. You want to be a little early. You want to be a little edgy. I think there are some people who just love feeling the being part of the right to like, you know, there may be majority of the users are going to wait until everything works stable. So that's why we think the sidecar is already a value add for those kind of people. Where, okay, they don't have to use the agents that much. They can use the sidecar. They can use Gmail. They can use calendar connectors. They can use like all this LinkedIn search features, YouTube, or just basic stuff like searching over your own history.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But then I asked it, like, create a list of everyone who follows me on X that works at Meta, and it gave me one person, and I know for a fact there's many more than that. Or, for example, I said, find my last interview with the CEO of Perplexity. And it said it couldn't. But then it showed a source link to the interview. So the answer said it couldn't, but the source didn't. I see some brittleness in the product, and I know it's early, but I'm just wondering, is all of that just bugs or is that anything inherent in the models or the way you've architected it?”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Would say that based on, and I'll caveat that I haven't spent weeks yet with it, but based on my early experience with it, I would describe it as a little brittle or unpredictable in terms of the success rate. I asked it to book a very, or take me to the booking page for a very specific flight that I wanted, and it did it. And it took me to the page where, and it filled in some stuff. Whereas, you know, the normal”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You really have to know how to harness the capabilities and have the right evals and like version control the prompts and do any post training of auxiliary models, which is basically our expertise. We are very good at these things.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, sourcing and reach outs. And then you got to do state tracking. Okay, it's not just about doing this one task, but you wanted to keep following up, keep a track of their responses. If maybe some people respond, go and update the Google Sheets, mark the status as responded or in progress and follow up with those candidates, sync with my Google Calendar, and then resolve conflicts and scheduler chat. and then push me a brief ahead of the meeting. Some of these things should be proactive. It doesn't even have to be a prompt. That's the extent to which we have an ambition to make the browser into something that feels more like an OS, where these are processes that are running all the time. It's not going to be easy to do all this today. But in general, we have been successful at identifying the sweet spots where things that are currently on the edge of working.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Tabs and tools are sufficiently good reasoning model, like slightly better, maybe GPT 5, maybe like Claude 4.5. I don't know. Get us over the edge where all these things are suddenly possible. And then a recruiter's work worth one week is just like one prompt.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I want you to give me an exhaustive list of people like that, port it over to a Google Sheets with a LinkedIn URLs. And I want you to go to Zoom info and try to get me their email so that I can reach out to them. And I also want you to bulk draft a personalized cold email to each of them to reach out to for a coffee chat. I don't think you can do this today. It can do parts of it. So you still have to be the orchestrator stitching to stitching them together. I'm pretty sure six months to a year from now you can do the entire thing. I'm betting on progress in reasoning models to get us there. Just like how in 2022 we bet on models like GPT-4 and Claude 3.5 sonnet to arrive to make the hallucination problem perplexity basically non-existent when you have a good index and a good model. I'm betting on the fact that in the right environment of a browser with access to all”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Definitely not perfect yet for long horizon tasks, like something that might take 15 minutes or something. I'll give you some examples. I want a list of engineers who have studied at Stanford and who also worked at Anthropic. And they don't have to be currently working at Anthropic, but they must have worked at Anthropic at least once.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Exactly. A lot of people are using ChatGPT for, you're on an email and you want to know how to respond. So you copy paste a bunch of context. You go there. You ask it to do something. And then you copy paste it back. You edit it finally in your Gmail box. Or you do it in your Google Sheets or Google Docs. All this is going to, the comment is just going to feel much more intuitive. You have it right there on the side and you can do your edits or you're using it to draft a tweet or like, you know, Elon Musk posts something you want to post the funny response to that. You can literally ask comment, hey, draft me a funny reply tweet to that and it'll automatically have it ready for you. You literally have to click the post button all that stuff is going to definitely reduce the amount of times you literally open another tab and like keep asking the AI. And firing up jobs right from your current website to go”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In fact, I still don't think people really, it's not really a widespread thing. There are some people who really know how to use these AI tools very well. And most people have at least used it once or twice a week and they don't actually use it in their day-to-day workflows. The browser is going to go through a similar trajectory. On the other hand, the one use case that's been very natural, very intuitive, that you don't even have to teach people how to use this as a sidecar. It's just picked up so much that I feel like it'll be so intuitive. It'll almost be like without the sidecar, why am I using the browser anymore? That's how it's going to feel.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, no, I appreciate that, and it's been a thing for me myself as a user, is that even though it's fun to build all these agent use cases, it takes a while to stop doing things the usual way And start using the AIs more, which includes even basic things like what reply you type onto an email thread. Even though Google has these automatic suggested replies, I don't actually usually like it. And it doesn't often pull context from outside Gmail to help me do that. Or Slack checking on Unread Slack messages. I usually just go open Slack as a tab and try to scroll through those 50 or 100 channels I'm on clicking each of those channels, like reading all the messages that are unread. It takes time to actually train myself to use Comet. So what we plan to do is actually publish a lot of the early use cases on an educational material and have it be widely accessible. I think it's going to go through the same trajectory that chatbots had. I think the beginning when ChatGPT was launched, I'm sure not a lot of people knew how to use it. What are all the ways in which you could take advantage of it?”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I want to get into that, and I have a lot of business model questions about comet because it is also very compute intensive for you and expensive to run, which you've talked about. But to my point about the learning curve and making it approachable, how do you do that? Because when I first opened it, it's kind of like, I don't know what I can do with this thing. I mean, I go to your ex account and I see all the things you're sharing. But I do think there's going to be a learning curve that the people building these products don't necessarily appreciate”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“By the way, Alex, I want to make one point. There was some article either from Words or somewhere else that Google was trying to use To predict maximal engagement time on a YouTube video and show the ad around that timestamp. Perplexity on the common browser was using AI to exactly save your time to get you the exact timestamp you want in a fine grained basis and not waste your time. So often people ask why would Google not do this and that the incentives are completely different here.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back with perplexity CORVIN Srinivas. Your tagline for comet is enabling people to, quote, browse at the speed of thought. I find that there's actually a very steep learning curve to understanding what it can do.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They would choose to spend it on entertainment more than intellectual working. Or if people derive entertainment from intellectual stuff like intellectual entertainment, I think that's fine too, like reading books, all these things are fine, like reading blog posts that you otherwise wouldn't get time to read when you're in the middle of work. I think these are the kind of ways in which we want the browser to evolve where people launch a bunch of comment assistant jobs like tasks that would take like a few minutes to complete on the background and they're like chilling and like scrolling through X or whatever the social they like.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think people are still going to watch YouTube videos for fun or exploration, but not when I'm actually landing at a video, like, I mean, you do a lot of intellectual stuff. So it's not always fun to watch the entire thing, but I like watching specific things in a video. And also, by the way, when I'm in the middle of work, I can't be watching the Virge podcast, right? But I still don't want to wait till the entire weekend to fully watch it. I want to instantly know what Zuckerberg might have said in your video about their cluster or something. And then in the weekend, I can go back and watch the entire thing. I'm going to have a lot more time on my hands. So it's not actually going to stop the regular browsing. I actually think people are going to scroll through social platforms or like watch Netflix or YouTube even more, I would say, because they have more time on their hands. The AI is going to do a lot of their work. It's just that”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And I'm glad you brought up the sidebar because for people who haven't tried it or seen it, that is the main way comet diverts from Chrome is that you've got this AI assistant orchestration layer that sits on the side of a web page that you can use to interact with the web page and also just go off and do things. That interface suggests that You see the web as being less about actually browsing. I mean, you just said no one really has time to watch a YouTube video. Is the browsing part of the browser becoming less meaningful in the world of AI?”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You have like it almost feels like you should never watch a YouTube video standalone anymore unless you have a lot of time on your hands. And it's fantastic, right? And people use it for LinkedIn. Honestly searching over LinkedIn is very hard. They don't have a working search engine basically. So the agent figures out all these shortcuts, like how we figure out using these filters, people search, a connection search, and it's able to give recruiting power that was never possible before. I would say it's better than using LinkedIn premium.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Actually, while these are the more glamorous use cases, I would say the boring dominant one is always invoking the sidecar and having it do stuff for you on the webpage you're on, not necessarily just simple summarization, but more complex questions. Let's say I'm watching Alex Health's podcast with Zuckerberg or something, and I want to know specifically what he said about a topic. And I want to take that and send it as a message to my teammates on Slack. I think that's the thing you can just invoke the assistant on the site and do it instantly. It's connected to your Gmail, your calendar. It's also like able to pull the transcript from the YouTube video. It has fine grain access. And it's immediately able to retrieve the relevant snippet. I can even ask it to play it from that exact time step instead of going through the entire transcript and control F thing whatever I want. That is the level of advice.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talking now a couple of weeks or so after Comet came out and it's still invite only or I think it's also restricted to your premium tier, your 200 a month tier. But you've been tweeting a lot of examples of how people have been using it. They've been using it to make Facebook ads, do FedEx customer support chat, run their smart home accessories, make Facebook marketplace listings, schedule calendar meetings. There's been a lot of stuff that you've shown. I'm curious.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Like Apple Intelligent Speed on iOS or Mac OS or whatever, right? Because I think there's generally an expectation that everything needs to live on the client side. That's not necessary to be private. You can still be pretty secure and private with frontier intelligence on the server. So that's the architecture we brought in on Comet.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, the agent only sees it when you ask a prompt relevant. For example, based on what I've ordered on Amazon in the last month, recommend me some new supplements or go and order the magnesium supplement that I've already ordered frequently on Amazon. The agent only sees that for that one single prompt and doesn't actually store your entire Amazon history on our servers. And you can always ensure that your prompts get deleted from our servers. So even the prompts we can choose not to look at, even for like, you know, let's say fine-tuning purposes. Let's say we want to make our agents good for at an aggregate, oh, like users have done Amazon shopping queries. Let's go and like make it better on that. We don't even need to look at that if you choose to not retain your prompt. So that's the level of privacy and security we want to offer. At the same time, the frontier intelligence is all on the server side. This is one of the main reasons why Apple is struggling to ship all.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There's no need to reinvent the wheel here. In terms of UI, we felt like it would be better to retain the most familiar UI people already are used to. And imports need to work. Otherwise, you're going to be like, oh, this is not working. Oh, that thing has all my personal context. I'm missing out on it. I don't want to go through the friction of logging into all the apps again. I think that that was very important for us, for the onboarding step, which is not only onboarding you as a human, but also onboarding the AI. Because the moment you're already logged into all the third-party apps that you were logged in on Chrome, in the exact same security standards, the agent gets access to that on your client and can immediately show you the magic of the product.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Processes, the way they've gone about security, encryption, and just the performance, the core back-end performance of Chromium as an engine, rendering engines that they have is all really good. There's no need to reinvent that. And at the same time, it's an open source project. So it's easy to hire developers for perplexity. They can come work on the common browser, especially if it's something that has open standards. And we want to continue contributing to Chromium RSLs too. We don't want to just consume Chromium and build a product out of it, but we actually want to give back to the ecosystem. So that's natural. And the second thing is a dominant browser right now. Like Chrome, and almost, if you actually include Edge, which is also a Chromium fork, Ducta Go, Brave, they're all like Chromium Forks. Only Safari is based on WebKit. So it's actually the dominant browser.”
2025-07-17 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT