“Stop watching reels. Go build your own future”: Perplexity CEO

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas said that the young generation needs to spend less time scrolling through Instagram and more time learning about artificial intelligence (AI).

In the podcast interview with Matthew Berman, he remarked that mastering AI tools is now mandatory to stay relevant in the job market. 

As AI is growing at a rapid pace, with new advancements being announced every week, Srinivas claimed that the speed at which humans can adapt is being tested by AI technologies.

He remarked that “the human race has never been extremely fast at adapting” and that those who don’t keep up run the risk of losing their grip on the job market.

Earlier, he shared that they had "made it compulsory" at their company for its engineers to use AI coding tools such as Cursor or GitHub Copilot to generate blocks of code and debug programs.

Perplexity mandated the use of AI coding tools, stating 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.”

Aravind Srinivas's company reported a 20% month-over-month growth in May with 780 million queries.

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

Aravind Srinivas shared 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," he remarked at the event.

Aravind Srinivas advises adopting AI technologies

“People who are at the frontier of using AI systems are going to be way more employable than people who are not. That’s guaranteed to happen,” said Srinivas.

He said that although social media is entertaining, it does not help advance the user’s professional goals.

The Perplexity CEO further encouraged the youth to start a business or join companies that are embracing AI. “People who lose jobs will either start their own companies using AI or join new businesses that use AI tools,” he said.

Srinivas gave a wake-up call to the doomscrolling young generation by saying, “Stop watching reels. Go build your own future”. 

“You can’t become exceptional by consuming mediocre content,” he said.

Also read: ‘Indians can now make payments abroad’: PayPal to launch new UPI-enabled cross-border payments platform, PayPal World (startuppedia.in)