Some Called ChatGPT The ‘Google Killer,’ But Is $18B AI-Powered Answer Engine Perplexity The Real Threat?
Perplexity Founder Aravind Srinivas is planting his flag in the fierce race to lead in AI.
Srinivas is a former intern at Google and OpenAI who was inspired to create his own billion-dollar tech company. Fortune reports that Srinivas had been a Google student his entire life. So, it is no surprise that he was greatly inspired by Google CEO Sundar Pichai, also from his hometown, Chennai, India. A turning point in his journey to becoming a founder was reading the book, “In the Plex.” He came across it while interning at Google DeepMind’s headquarters in London, and the book detailed Google’s first 15 years.
Srinivas’s exact vision for his startup would be molded later during his time at OpenAI, behind the popular large language model ChatGPT, which was first released in 2022. The company, led by CEO Sam Altman, has announced its latest innovation, GPT-5, describing it as a “Ph.D.-level expert” in your pocket, as AFROTECH™ previously reported.
However, Srinivas did not want to replicate a large language model. For one, he did not have the millions of dollars to build it to scale correctly, and secondly, several major companies were already doing the work.
“There were already, like, five or six players building models,” Srinivas explained, per Fortune. “So we thought, ‘Don’t be the yet-another-model company.’”
Perplexity
Instead, he launched Perplexity alongside Johnny Ho, Denis Yarats, and Andy Konwinski in 2022, Technology Magazine reports. The company launched just weeks after ChatGPT, but its design was different. ChatGPT could not access the web early on and only pulled answers from its training data, so output was not always accurate, and its language model often fell victim to “hallucination,” per Fortune. On the other hand, Perplexity, an AI-powered answer engine, summarized its findings from web pages and offered footnotes, including where the information was retrieved from, while providing imagery.
This was also in contrast to Google, which shares various blue links for an inquiry with users instead of direct information. However, Google has since improved its platform, leveraging Gemini 2.0 to share “AI Overviews,” which summarize information about a question or topic and provide a link. In May, it launched “AI Mode,” a feature that is more aligned with Perplexity and has impacted its clickthrough rates.
Srinivas told Fortune the company could be “something better than Google.”
“In a world where you can easily create fake content with AI, accurate answers and trustworthy sources become even more essential,” he said, according to Fortune.
$18B Valuation
Perplexity is doing well. It has logged nearly 1 billion queries each month, earned $100 million in annual recurring revenue by March, boasts an $18 billion valuation, and has backing from Amazon Founder Jeff Bezos, Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, and chipmaker Nvidia.
