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No Priors Ep. 9 | With Perplexity AI’s Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats

With advances in machine learning, the way we search for information online will never be the same. This week on the No Priors podcast, we dive into a startup that aims to be the most trustworthy place to search for information online. Perplexity.ai is a search engine that provides answers to questions in a conversational way and hints at what the future of search might look like. Aravind Srinivas is a Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity. He is a former research scientist at Open AI and completed his PhD in computer science at University of California Berkeley. Denis Yarats is a Co-Founder and Perplexity’s CTO. He has a background in machine learning, having worked as a Research Scientist at Facebook AI Research and a machine learning engineer at Quora. 00:00 - Introduction 01:46 - How Perplexity AI iterates quickly and how the company has changed over time 05:46 - Approach to hiring and building a fast-paced team 10:43 - Why you don’t need AI pedigree to transition to work or research AI 14:01 - Challenges when transitioning from AI research to running a company as CEO & CTO 16:50 - Why Perplexity only shows answers it can cite 19:33 - How Perplexity approaches reinforcement learning 20:49 - Trustworthiness and if an answer engine needs a personality 23:05 - Why answer engines will become their own market segment 26:38 - Implications of “the era of fewer clicks” on publishers and advertisers 30:20 - Monetization strategy 33:20 - Advice for those deciding between academia or startups

Sarah GuohostAravind SrinivasguestDenis YaratsguestElad Gilhost
Apr 24, 202339mWatch on YouTube ↗

At a glance

WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT

Perplexity Founders Reimagine Search As Trustworthy Conversational Answer Engine

  1. Perplexity AI founders Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats discuss how they built a small, extremely fast-iterating team to create a citation-first, conversational search product aimed at becoming the most trusted information service.
  2. They emphasize hiring for raw drive and engineering excellence over prior ML/LLM pedigree, drawing on lessons from academia, OpenAI, DeepMind, and big-tech research cultures.
  3. A core product philosophy is factual accuracy via mandatory citations and reinforcement learning from human feedback, positioning Perplexity as an 'answer engine' rather than a traditional link-based search engine.
  4. They explore the future of search, likely monetization paths, the changing relationship with publishers, and offer advice to researchers choosing between academia, industry, and startups in today’s AI boom.

IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING

5 ideas

Speed of iteration is the core startup advantage over incumbents.

Perplexity’s founders deliberately built a tiny, highly capable team, prioritized fast experimentation, and avoided spreading efforts across too many products, recognizing that speed is their only durable edge against large search incumbents.

Hire for drive and general engineering excellence, not narrow LLM credentials.

They prioritize candidates with strong systems/engineering skills and a 'burning desire' to work on AI, often using trial work periods to assess fit, and explicitly reject the idea that only prior LLM experts can succeed in an AI-first company.

A citation-first design can fundamentally improve trust in AI answers.

Perplexity is built to never state facts it cannot cite, treating citations as foundational rather than an add-on, which both constrains hallucinations and gives users transparency into sources and the ability to prune irrelevant ones.

Answer engines will shift user behavior from link-clicking to consuming synthesized responses.

They expect search to evolve toward conversational, follow-up-rich 'answer engines' that surface a few high-quality sources, reduce tab overload, and increasingly perform actions on behalf of users.

Publisher incentives may realign around quality rather than SEO hacks.

Because LLMs assess semantic relevance, the founders believe high-quality content will be cited more than keyword-stuffed pages, potentially reducing classic SEO gaming and making citation ranking closer to academic-style PageRank.

WORDS WORTH SAVING

5 quotes

Iteration speed is the only thing you can hope for if you don’t yet know your product or market.

— Aravind Srinivas

Perplexity is a citation-first service; it’ll never say anything that it cannot cite.

— Aravind Srinivas

I would rather get somebody who has this burning desire to work on these things than somebody who already has a lot of experience.

— Denis Yarats

The companies that made the most progress over the last six years were the ones with extremely good engineers.

— Denis Yarats

It’s best to look for alternatives to the transformer; I would work on trying to write the next transformer paper.

— Aravind Srinivas

Founding story and evolution of Perplexity AI’s product directionBuilding a high-velocity engineering culture and hiring philosophyFrom search engines to conversational 'answer engines'Factual accuracy, citations, and handling hallucinations and biasUse of reinforcement learning and human feedback in PerplexityMonetization models and competitive dynamics with Google/BingCareer advice for AI researchers and the role of academia vs industry

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