“Google band karo, Perplexity use karo (Stop using Google, use Perplexity),” said Shashank Dixit, the Billionaire CEO of Deskera Open Source, in a recent podcast with Ranveer Allahbadia. He explains how it is a company by Indian “bhaiya” (brother) and how it is competing with Google. 

If you have been following any of the AI news, you must have come across Perplexity AI, the AI search engine company built by the IIT Madras and University of Berkeley graduate, and “tech bhai”, Aravind Srinivas, along with co-founders Denis Yarats (former Facebook AI research scientist), Andy Konwinshki (co-founder of Databricks), and Johnny Ho (former Quora engineer) and is now valued at $520 million.

The 16-month-old startup recently acquired funding of $73.6 million from NVIDIA and even Jeff Bezos, and is also backed by Nat Friedman, Andrej Karpathy, Yann LeCun, Elag Gil, Naval Ravikant, and several others. Most recently, Srinivas posted a photo with Satya Nadella, which said, “Let’s make them dance” in response to another post talking about how Perplexity will make Google dance. 

The Google killer?

Srinivas also interned at OpenAI as a research scientist and DeepMind as well. Now, he is in a bid to make a Google competitor, which he says – “Answers are the first real threat to 10 blue links”. At the same time, he is very passionate about comparing his product to Google. 

He explained in an interview with Silicon Valley Girl that initially there was no product, but the team just wanted to use a chatbot that could explain everything to them without the hassle of insurance ads on Google Search. For this, the team used GPT-3.5 and Bing Search and made a Slack bot to answer their questions. “But people started using it as a Google replacement,” he added. “It is actually way better than Google.”

“We haven’t thought through that part yet, but we at least know that it won’t be the exact same thing,” said Srinivas. He recently also said that Perplexity is making Larry Page’s 23-year-old dream of Google being an AI search engine come true. “But the timing wasn’t right back then. There were no chat LLMs. But the man was a visionary. The ultimate search engine is an AI-powered answer engine, like Perplexity.”

To add to his point, just like Perplexity, Bezos was also one of the investors of Google in 1998, before it had a business model figured out. The same is the case with Perplexity, as the company still does not have a business model. “You are irrelevant anyway. If you launch this and lose you are still gonna be the same,” Srininvas added about the advice from his investors. 

And that is what the team did. Just a simple search bar that gives a summary of the query with links to the sources. Cut to the future, Srinivas recently also posted on X that their model is going to be available on Apple Vision Pro. 

“You should never do the same thing that someone else has done.”

Srinivas believes that Google’s UI design would go away sometime soon, and possibly get replaced by something like Perplexity. He believes that someone who has been doing something for decades, shouldn’t be challenged. It should be something new. At the same time, Srinivas wants Google to build a very similar product, which it is already aiming at with Bard, and now powering with Gemini. 

Back in 2022, when Perplexity AI did not have any sign-in options on its website, it also created a search engine for Twitter (Now X) called BirdSQL. Built on top of OpenAI’s API, Twitter API, and PostgresSQL, the model would allow easier search capabilities for finding specific posts on the website. Former owner of Twitter, Jack Dorsey, endorsed the creation. 

But cut to the present, Perplexity is not profitable yet. Srinivas said that it is very hard to gain profitability when the cost of the infrastructure is so high. Regardless, the road looks good ahead for Perplexity, and Srinivas is taking it in the right direction. 

“The reason we exist is because actually improving search and making information access a lot more efficient with fewer keyword queries, less sifting, link clicking, page viewing; and directly getting to the bottom of things and making a decision with a succinct clean personalised answer, is at odds with the financial and business goals of Google, and that’s the opportunity for someone else to start from a blank slate and rethink the product and business from scratch. The world wants that,” he said in a post. 

To this, Robert Scoble replied, “People forget Google was the 17th search engine.”

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