In a candid interview with Bloomberg, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, a rising AI startup, shared insights into the company’s ambitious plans to scale its search capabilities and challenge incumbents like Google and OpenAI in the rapidly evolving AI search landscape.
Having experienced significant growth in a short period, the Srinivas emphasized that Perplexity’s next strategic focus is twofold: building a robust in-house search index and refining its mobile distribution strategy. “Search is all about distribution,” the Srinivas remarked, drawing parallels to how Sundar Pichai’s prowess in distributing Chrome propelled him to Google’s leadership.
Perplexity has enlisted the expertise of Emil Michael, a former Uber growth strategist, to emulate Uber’s aggressive user acquisition tactics. “Startups have to be aggressive in competing against incumbents who already have billions of users,” the Srinivas stated, acknowledging OpenAI’s 100 million user base as a formidable challenge.
On the search front, Perplexity has onboarded Mikhail Parakhin, the former head of Bing who spearheaded the Bing Chat co-pilot, to advise on building in-house search infrastructure. The goal is to provide users with direct text answers instead of just links, a capability the Srinivas believes will differentiate Perplexity from Google’s “search generative experience,” which they view as largely unchanged from the previous year’s offering.
The CEO emphasized the importance of providing a consistent and predictable user experience, contrasting Perplexity’s focused question-answering approach with Google’s “cluttered” UI that blends ads, panels, and varying response formats.
Addressing Google’s potential reaction to Perplexity’s advancements, the CEO expressed confidence in their product’s simplicity and minimal design appealing to users. However, they acknowledged that certain commercially driven search categories, such as shopping, travel, and education, might be areas where Google has less incentive to provide comprehensive overviews to protect advertising revenue.
While Perplexity leverages technologies like GPT-3 and OpenAI’s language models, the Srinivas dismissed concerns about potential OpenAI competition in search, stating that their approach of building a separate product is cleaner than Google’s attempts to integrate generative AI into existing search.
On the funding front, the Srinivas affirmed that while Perplexity aims for efficiency, additional fundraising rounds may be necessary to support the resource-intensive nature of answering queries at scale. Currently, Perplexity is serving close to 10 million daily queries, a significant increase from its initial stages, and the Srinivas projects surpassing Bing Chat’s 2023 query volume of 1 billion by serving 500 million queries this year alone.
As the AI search race intensifies, Perplexity’s CEO exudes confidence in the company’s ability to sustain its growth trajectory, fueled by a focused strategy, strategic partnerships, and a determination to outpace industry giants through innovation and aggressive user acquisition tactics.
