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Home » Transcript: Perplexity CEO Srinivas on Winning Search With AI

Transcript: Perplexity CEO Srinivas on Winning Search With AI

Read the full transcript of Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder and CEO of Perplexity, in conversation with Bloomberg’s Shirin Ghaffary about the startup’s approach to reinventing online search, rising investor interest, and how Perplexity plans to stay ahead in the AI innovation race at Bloomberg Tech in San Francisco. (June 6, 2025)

From Google Intern to Google Competitor

SHIRIN GHAFFARY: You started Perplexity with the ambitious mission of taking on Google using AI. And what most people don’t know is that you were actually an intern at Google DeepMind in 2019. It was your first job after studying for your PhD at UC Berkeley. Go Bears. Did you know when you were interning at Google that you would just a few years later start a multibillion dollar startup going against it?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Definitely not. But I did everything an intern would do, just sleep in the office. They had all these pods which you can use to sleep in the office. They had a library. They had a lot of food, a lot of junk food too, which, you know, definitely I put on a lot of weight while I was in London.

And so it was one of the best times I had in my life. I think there’s a lot of things I would say. DeepMind was almost like a different company. I even remember how Demis had all these crazy visions of how AI will just be a scientist by itself and it’ll solve all theorems and proofs. And they were on a completely different trajectory.

So now they got folded back into Google to get them back into this AI race on the product stuff. But to me, DeepMind meant a lot more in terms of just going for that core artificial general intelligence dream. It was a fantastic time.

Building the Answer Machine

SHIRIN GHAFFARY: So you went on to work at OpenAI in its early days and then eventually decided to break out and start Perplexity. And for those who don’t know, can you tell us a little bit about what Perplexity is?

ARAVIND SRINIVAS: So Perplexity is an answer machine. You get answers that you can really trust. We were the first to reimagine search in the form of conversations and answers with trusted sources. And we did it in a way that essentially became the blueprint for every other chatbot out there.

Yes, everybody else has integrated search too, but when we started, people made fun of us, saying, in AI, hallucination is meant to be a feature, not a bug. And so I even had a former Googler who was one of my early seed investors, and he said, this looks good, but the reason ChatGPT is going viral now is because people want to laugh at AI’s mistakes.

And your product is trying to design it in a way where you do not make mistakes because you’re always pulling sources and summarizing what humans are saying. You’re not telling what the AI thinks. So I don’t think this will work. That was what was told to me. He literally said, you should go and build something like character AI, where people actually enjoy it. Like AI saying arbitrary, random stuff. And I’m glad I didn’t listen to that.

And I believe that this fundamentally a completely different tool. We didn’t even build it as a Google replacement, actually. We just built it because it was really useful to us. I was a very newbie founder, CEO. I didn’t take any health insurance because I was like, I’m all in on this company. I don’t care if the company doesn’t work. That’s my health insurance, actually.

And then my founders, the co founders were married, so they had health insurance to their wives. So that was when my first employee we hired, he asked for insurance and I had no idea which HR tool to use. What are all these different plans? How do you even figure out which plan to go for?

And of course insurance is that one adword category that Google makes like billions of dollars a year, so they have literally zero incentive to tell you which plan to pick or which provider to go for. And that’s when we started building these tools that could just give you answers directly in a chat interface, but plug into the web.

And so we kind of essentially built it as a tool we wanted and, and our friends wanted it, our investors wanted it, and then we put it out into the world. Never thought about it as like, oh, links, 10 blue links to answers. But once we put it out, that’s when we realized based on what people are saying, hey, this is actually a much better way to consume the Internet. We’re all living on the Internet. And so I would rather just feel the Internet through answers instead of links.

Staying Ahead of the Competition

SHIRIN GHAFFARY: Got it. So yeah, you guys were really one of the first AI companies to do real time AI search, focused on that linking back. Now everyone’s doing that, right? Including Google, including OpenAI. So what are you doing to differentiate? And do you want to talk a little bit about Comet, your new browser, which I took a sneak peek at and is really interesting.

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ARAVIND SRINIVAS: Sure. Look, with respect to Google, I mean, I don’t mind saying this, like every year it’s the same feature announced in the IO. Like I think in 2023 they called it Search Generative Experience. In 2024 they called it AI Overview. This year they called it AI Mode. Next year they’ll call it another name.

But at the end of the day, the feature never gets shipped to the user. Literally. This is not hard. They have all the models, they have the best index, they have all the best infrastructure. They have their own hardware, data centers, everything. 3 billion, 4 billion users. So why not just change it? Why change google.com, make it perplexity.

Anyway, AI mode is literally, even the font is basically perplexity.