Aravind Srinivas, the Indian-origin CEO of Perplexity AI is on global news for all the right reasons. To the unawares, Perplexity AI is a conversational search engine tool that uses large language models (LLMs) to answer queries using sources from the web and cites links within the text response.
Perplexity AI, now valued at over $9 billion is on a mission to build the world's most knowledge-centric company. Backed by Jeff Bezos, Elad Gil, Nat Friedman, Tobi Lutke, Jeff Dean, Susan Wojcicki, Yann LeCun, Naval Ravikant, Paul Buchheit, Andrej Karpathy, and several others, the company has built the world's first generally available conversational answer engine that directly answers questions about any topic.
Incidentally, AI data cloud firm Snowflake’s Chief Executive Officer Sridhar Ramaswamy shared his confidence in Perplexity’s strategy of Application Programming Interface (API)-driven approach.
Ramaswamy said Perplexity was quick on innovation and building a successful product, while California startup Neeva’s focus on creating a search engine from scratch proved unsustainable.
Also read: “Work-Life Balance Is Lie,” Says Anupam Mittal; Namita Thapar Contradicts, “This Is a Crock of Bull****" (startuppedia.in)
Who is Aravind Srinivas?
After doing B. Tech and M.Tech in Electrical Engineering from IIT, Madras, Srinivas completed a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California and has been a research intern in DeepMind and Google.
After that, he worked as a Research Scientist in OpenAI, San Fransisco, for a year before founding Perplexity. He is an angel investor in several AI startups such as Eleven Labs (AI Voices), Mistral (AI Foundation Models), Cognition Labs (AI Software Engineer), Cursor (AI-first Code Editor), Pika Labs (AI Videos), Suno (AI Music), etc.
Interestingly, the Perplexity founder had been waiting for his green card status for three years. The green card or a Permanent Resident Card, allows its holder to live and work permanently in the United States.
Recently, Srinivas asked his X followers if he should get a green card, to which billionaire entrepreneur and X owner Elon Musk gave a short affirmative response, “Yes.”
Also read: Yogurt Brand Epigamia's Co-Founder Rohan Mirchandani Suddenly Passes Away at 42 (startuppedia.in)
/startuppedia/media/media_files/2024/12/23/OJGBArlRqtaIDPiGuyaH.jpeg)