Read the full transcript of Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas’ talk titled “How AI Will Answer Questions We Haven’t Thought to Ask” at TEDAI San Francisco on October 22, 2024.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Unconventional Tech Founder
ARAVIND SRINIVAS: There are a couple of ways I’m not a traditional tech founder. I never dropped out of college. In fact, I kept going. I’m an academic, you could say. And it’s OK to be proud that I have a PhD in AI from Berkeley, right here in the Bay Area.
But there’s something interesting in AI that I’ve noticed, compared to other tech founders. Other stereotypes, at least. A lot of us hold PhDs. I mean, quite a lot. 11 out of 24 speakers just at this conference have PhDs, and over a third are assistant, associate or full professors with major universities.
Only time will tell if this is a new trend of seeing academics in technology startups. But I got pretty curious to find out if this is common or new. And it turns out this is somewhat new. Only over a year ago, researchers at the University of Maryland found a 38 percent decline at the rate of startup formation or share of employment by US PhDs over the past 20 years. Yet our attendance here today and the trend in AI technology broadly does not seem to correlate with this finding. As I said, only time and more data will tell.
The Legacy of Academic Founders
In the meantime, my curiosity led me to another question: What was the last major technology company founded by academics? Google.
At Perplexity, we get accused of trying to kill Google a lot. But trust me, we’re not really trying to kill things. We are motivated about building things.
The cofounders of Google would probably say the same. Let’s hear from Larry Page. An interview of his from the year 2000:
“AI would be the ultimate version of Google. So if we had the ultimate search engine, it would understand everything on the web. It would understand, you know, exactly what you wanted, and it would give you the right thing. And that’s obviously artificial intelligence. It would be able to answer any question, basically, because almost everything is on the web, right?”
Think about that. Artificial intelligence in the year 2000. I was only six back then.
The Future of Technology and Humanity
There are a few things interesting about this interview. One, Larry did accurately predict the future of search almost 25 years ago. The future of search is artificial intelligence. That’s why I’m here, and we’re going to talk more about it.
Second, it’s very interesting how a common theme in interviews like those or events like these is us thinking about the future. What is the future of search? What is the future of technology? What is the future of AI? I’m sure a lot of you have lots of thoughts about these questions. In some sense, that is the purpose of technology: to keep us thinking and to keep us evolving.
But people like Larry, or people like you or people like me, we are not building technology in a vacuum. We are building technology for us, the people. We are the people. So when we come here to think about what is the future of technology or what is the future of AI, let’s ask ourselves this question: What is the future of us, the people?
I believe that AI will make us even more human.
The Power of Relentless Questioning
Socrates, the Greek philosopher, is famous for saying that wisdom comes from realizing how little we know, or that progress can only be made by asking better questions. The Socratic method is essentially the practice of relentless questioning. Relentless questioning is something academics do all the time. It has been core to the progress of human intellect over the past 1,000 years.
Relentless questioning is also a practice that can be done orders of magnitude better with the power of AI.
And by the way, relentless questioning is something south Indian parents do when you tell them you’re leaving a good university or a stable job to go join a startup.
So, jokes aside, relentless questioning is something fundamentally human. The physicist David Deutsch has proposed that we humans are the only species who have curiosity for what is already familiar. We can know so much about the stars above us or the machines in front of us and yet continue to have more questions about them. It seems like for humans, every answer leads to a new set of questions. Questions that we haven’t even asked before. That, to me, is what the future of technology should be about.
The Birth of Perplexity
And it’s also how Perplexity was born. I was raised as an academic in the comforting arms of universities. So when I actually entered the real world and tried to do my own company, I had an endless set of questions. SPVs, SAFE notes, health insurance. I needed to figure all these things out. And all these required to do a lot of research and needed actual answers. And traditional search engines left me lost. There was a ton of information and very little time to evaluate any of it. And neither did I have access to all of the experts on all these topics. So I was actually truly in a state of perplexity.
So that’s when I thought, maybe I could have an AI do this for me. Maybe I could go ask an AI all these questions, if it was able to pull information from the web and answer all my questions. So my cofounders and I came together, and we built a Sackbot where we could just ask our own questions.
Once we began using it is when we realized what we built was much bigger than ourselves. For the first time, I had the ability to go ask whatever question I wanted about any topic, no matter my level of expertise in it, and get a well-researched answer from the web. And it’s not just about an answer. It’s an answer that I can actually trust.
In this case, every answer in Perplexity comes with sources from the web in the form of citations, just like academics cite their sources. Now this is pretty powerful because trust is not unique to animals or humans, but it empowers us pretty differently. In the case of humans, an answer you could trust allows you to ask better follow-up questions. More questions lead to more knowledge. That’s the point of ensuring that you could always get an answer with well-cited sources.
The Democratization of Knowledge
And in Perplexity, ever since the beginning, every answer has always come with sources that allows you to ask more questions. In my case, once I ask questions about SAFE notes or insurance, I ask more questions. What areas outside of insurance could I benefit from having access to better answers? Who else in the world benefits from having access to better answers?
Now the answer is basically all of us. Every single person benefits from having access to better answers. This is such a profound shift in human history. Until recently, if you wanted the best answers, you had to be someone who could afford it. You had to be someone who had access to the greatest minds in the world or the best materials, libraries, expertise. And now that’s changing.
If a major achievement of the internet was to give everyone access to all of the world’s information, a major achievement of AI would be to give everyone access to all of the world’s answers.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a Harvard professor or an underserved student in a developing nation, we all get access to the same answers. With AI that keeps getting better and better at answering all our questions, the marginal cost of research is rapidly approaching zero.
The Future of Human Curiosity
In that new era of humanity that AI is powering, knowledge does not really care about who you are, where you’re from or who you have access to. Rather, what matters is the next question you’re going to ask. When all of the world’s answers are available to all of the world’s people, one can only wonder: What will the best questions be, and how many such questions will get asked?
This is again where David Deutsch argues that human potential is infinite. As long as we keep engaging in relentless questioning and keep asking an interesting set of questions, the sky is the limit in terms of what we can actually learn.
For example, humans are always curious. You can see that in babies. Even before they learn to crawl, they’re pretty curious about what’s around them. That’s a natural trait for all of us. Take an example of the technologies that we are building. In the case of the bot that became Perplexity. Once I got answers to something like health insurance, I could ask an infinite set of new questions, ranging from very pointed ones, like, what are concrete ways to improve the health care insurance industry, to very broad ones, like, who else would benefit from having access to such a technology?
It seems to a curious species every question and answer that you get is a lead to the next set of questions, and spawns several paths of curiosity, more than any one person can keep track of. So when we are here to wonder about what is the future of technology, or what is the future of AI, we are merely talking about the outputs, the outputs of a much bigger question: What is the future of human curiosity?
Conclusion
It is my strong belief that in an age where AI gets better and better at answering all our questions, this human quality that makes us so human will become even more essential. Our innate curiosity and our relentless questioning. With all of the world’s answers available to us, the tools we use to ask our questions, and the stuff that we build using those answers, those to me are the future of our technology.
And more importantly, that is the future of us, the future of humans. We are all curious, and when we are curious, we want answers. We really do. But what we really want are those answers that lead us to the next set of questions. And I, for one, can’t wait to see what you will ask next.
