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