Lex Fridman Podcast
#434 – Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet
Wed, 19 Jun 2024
Arvind Srinivas is CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans find answers to questions on the Internet. Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: - Cloaked: https://cloaked.com/lex and use code LexPod to get 25% off - ShipStation: https://shipstation.com/lex and use code LEX to get 60-day free trial - NetSuite: http://netsuite.com/lex to get free product tour - LMNT: https://drinkLMNT.com/lex to get free sample pack - Shopify: https://shopify.com/lex to get $1 per month trial - BetterHelp: https://betterhelp.com/lex to get 10% off Transcript: https://lexfridman.com/aravind-srinivas-transcript EPISODE LINKS: Aravind's X: https://x.com/AravSrinivas Perplexity: https://perplexity.ai/ Perplexity's X: https://x.com/perplexity_ai PODCAST INFO: Podcast website: https://lexfridman.com/podcast Apple Podcasts: https://apple.co/2lwqZIr Spotify: https://spoti.fi/2nEwCF8 RSS: https://lexfridman.com/feed/podcast/ YouTube Full Episodes: https://youtube.com/lexfridman YouTube Clips: https://youtube.com/lexclips SUPPORT & CONNECT: - Check out the sponsors above, it's the best way to support this podcast - Support on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/lexfridman - Twitter: https://twitter.com/lexfridman - Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lexfridman - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lexfridman - Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/lexfridman - Medium: https://medium.com/@lexfridman OUTLINE: Here's the timestamps for the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time. (00:00) - Introduction (10:52) - How Perplexity works (18:48) - How Google works (41:16) - Larry Page and Sergey Brin (55:50) - Jeff Bezos (59:18) - Elon Musk (1:01:36) - Jensen Huang (1:04:53) - Mark Zuckerberg (1:06:21) - Yann LeCun (1:13:07) - Breakthroughs in AI (1:29:05) - Curiosity (1:35:22) - $1 trillion dollar question (1:50:13) - Perplexity origin story (2:05:25) - RAG (2:27:43) - 1 million H100 GPUs (2:30:15) - Advice for startups (2:42:52) - Future of search (3:00:29) - Future of AI
Full Episode
The following is a conversation with Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, a company that aims to revolutionize how we humans get answers to questions on the internet. It combines search and large language models, LLMs, in a way that produces answers where every part of the answer has a citation to human-created sources on the web.
This significantly reduces LLM hallucinations and makes it much easier and more reliable to use for research and general curiosity-driven late-night rabbit hole explorations that I often engage in. I highly recommend you try it out. Aravind was previously a PhD student at Berkeley, where we long ago first met, and an AI researcher at DeepMind, Google, and finally OpenAI as a research scientist.
This conversation has a lot of fascinating technical details on state-of-the-art in machine learning and general innovation in retrieval augmented generation, aka RAG, chain of thought reasoning, indexing the web, UX design, and much more. And now, a quick few second mention of each sponsor. Check them out in the description. It's the best way to support this podcast.
We got Cloaked for cyber privacy, ShipStation for shipping stuff, NetSuite for business stuff, Element for hydration, Shopify for e-commerce, and BetterHelp for mental health. Choose wisely, my friends. Also, if you want to work with our amazing team where I was hiring, or if you just want to get in touch with me, go to lexfriedman.com slash contact. And now onto the full ad reads.
As always, no ads in the middle. I try to make these interesting, but if you must skip them, friends, please still check out the sponsors. I enjoy their stuff. Maybe you will too.
This episode is brought to you by Cloaked, a platform that lets you generate a new email address and phone number every time you sign up for a new website, allowing your actual email and phone number to remain secret from said website. It's one of those things that I always thought should exist. There should be that layer, easy to use layer between you and the websites.
Because the desire, the drug of many websites to sell your email to others and thereby create a storm, a waterfall of spam in your mailbox is just too delicious. It's too tempting. There should be that layer. And of course, adding an extra layer in your interaction with websites has to be done well because you don't want it to be too much friction. It shouldn't be hard work.
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This episode is also brought to you by ShipStation, a shipping software designed to save you time and money on e-commerce order fulfillment. I think their main sort of target audience is business owners, medium scale, large scale business owners, because they're really good and make it super easy to ship a lot of stuff.
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