‘AI coding tools cut down work time from 3, 4 days to literally 1 hour,' says Perplexity CEO

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told Y Combinator that the AI search engine startup "made it compulsory" for its engineers to use AI coding tools such as Cursor or GitHub Copilot to generate blocks of code and debug programs.

 Aravind Srinivas opens up about mandating AI tools

Perplexity internally mandated the use of AI coding tools, saying that its engineers have become more productive.

As reported by Entrepreneur, the CEO said that Perplexity engineers have seen measurable outcomes by using tools to cut down on "experimentation time" for new tasks from "three, four days to literally one hour.”

"That level of change is incredible," Srinivas remarked. "The speed at which we can fix bugs and ship to production is crazy."

The AI search engine company reported a 20% month-over-month growth in May with 780 million queries.

At Bloomberg's Tech Summit in May, the Perplexity CEO predicted that within a year, the company would be handling "a billion queries a week."

The CEO disclosed that when the AI search engine was first introduced in 2022, it processed 3,000 queries a day, advancing to 30 million queries a day by May.

"It's been phenomenal growth," Srinivas stated at the event.

“Still, there are issues," Srinivas mentioned about using AI coding assistants, noting that the tools can introduce new bugs that software engineers aren't familiar with.

Last week, Perplexity introduced an AI-powered web browser, Comet, to take on Google Search and Google Chrome.

The newly launched Comet uses Perplexity's AI search engine as its default tool, putting the company's core product front and centre for users.

Srinivas said Big Tech like OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic cannot copy Comet, its new web browser with AI-powered search capabilities.

He claimed it takes time for anyone to build such a product compared to any chat tool, and that those companies cannot win in every sector. [Source: The Economic Times]

“It’s natural when there is a lot of money to be made in a certain sector, people are going to try to copy it, and there is only a limited number of things you can be world-class at, whether it is building great models or building one or two really good products. So, you are obviously not going to win at everything,” he said.

Incidentally, Perplexity was reportedly in late-stage talks for a $500 million funding round in May for a company valuation of $14 billion.

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