Aravind Srinivas praises Google CEO Sundar Pichai for giving him the freedom to eat his eggs.
Srinivas remembers an interview with Pichai popping up on his YouTube feed seven years ago. His vegetarian education in India did not include eggs, like many in the country, but now, in his early twenties, Srinivas wants to start eating more protein. Pichai, a hero to many aspiring entrepreneurs in India, nonchalantly describes his morning: wake up, read the newspaper, drink tea – and eat an omelette.
Srinivas shared the video with his mother. Well, she said: You can eat eggs.
Pichai’s influence extends far beyond Srinivas’ diet. He’s also the CEO of a search company called Perplexity AI, one of the most hyped applications of the generative AI era. Srinivas still draws inspiration from Pichai, the leader of the world’s largest search engine, but his admiration is more complicated.
“It’s like a competition now,” Srinivas said. “It’s embarrassing.”
Srinivas and Pichai both grew up in Chennai, in the southern Indian state of Tamil Nadu, although they were born 22 years apart. While Srinivas was studying for a PhD in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, Pichai had already been crowned CEO of Google.
In his first research internship, Srinivas worked at Google-owned DeepMind in London. That year, Pichai also got a new job, becoming CEO of Alphabet and Google. Srinivas found DeepMind’s work exciting, but he was dismayed to find that his rented apartment was a disaster—”it was rundown and infested with rats,” he said—so he sometimes slept in DeepMind’s offices. inside.
He discovered a book in his office library about the development and evolution of Google called in the bush, written by WIRED contributing editor Steven Levy. Srinivas read the book over and over again, deepening his appreciation for Google and its innovations. “Larry and Sergey became my entrepreneurial heroes,” Srinivas said. (He offered to list In Plex Quotes chapters and paragraphs from memory; Wired takes his word for it. )
Soon after, in 2020, Srinivas ended up working at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, as a research intern working on machine learning for computer vision. Slowly, Srinivas rose to prominence in the Google space and put some of his AI research to good use.
Then, in 2022, Srinivas and three co-founders, Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski, joined forces to try to develop a new way of using AI for search. They started working on an algorithm that could convert natural language into the database language SQL, but found this algorithm to be too narrow (or nerdy). Instead, they turned to a product that combined traditional search indexing with the relatively new capabilities of large language models. They call it confusion.
Perplexity is sometimes described as an “answer” engine rather than a search engine because of the way it uses artificial intelligence text generation to summarize results. New searches create conversation “threads” on specific topics. Enter your query and Perplexity will answer follow-up questions, asking you to refine your question. It eschews direct links in favor of text- or visual-based answers that don’t require you to click elsewhere to get the information.