Revolutionizing Search: AI Expert Aravind Srinivas Takes on Google with Perplexity

Aravind Srinivas, a recent PhD graduate from the University of California, Berkeley, has co-founded Perplexity, a generative-AI startup valued at $1bn. Despite his mother’s disappointment that he did not attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, his internships at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind on the west coast have made him an expert in generative artificial intelligence (AI).

Mr. Srinivas is known for his disruption theory and uses it to identify Alphabet’s vulnerability as Google’s parent company. He notes the differences in culture between OpenAI and DeepMind and turns to “The Innovator’s Dilemma” by Clayton Christensen to make his case for disrupting Google search with innovations like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. While some see this argument as off the mark, Mr. Srinivas is ambitious and aims to compete with one of the best business models of all time – Google search.