Stranger than fiction


That’s what Aravind Srinivas is trying to do through his AI-driven search company, Perplexity, which he co-founded in 2022, along with Andrew Konwinski, among others, shortly after completing his doctoral studies at UC Berkeley.

“Ph.D. students write papers, and for every sentence they write, they reference another paper. That way, the paper is [based on] scientific facts,” said Srinivas. “We baked that principle into an AI chatbot, and that ended up becoming Perplexity.”

He also drew inspiration from the comedy TV show Silicon Valley. 

“The plot revolved around this company developing the fictional Pied Piper compression algorithm,” said Srinivas. “At the time, some people in my lab and I were very interested in generative models and compression. And so that got us all into generative AI without us even realizing it.”


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