00:00 Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Monday, April 15th.
00:04 Today on Forbes, like Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid inside the buzzy AI startup coming
00:12 for Google's lunch.
00:15 In August 2022, Aravind Srinivas and Dinesh Yarat waited outside meta AI chief Jan Lekhan's
00:22 office in lower Manhattan for five long hours, skipping lunch for the chance to give the
00:27 NYU professor a demo of their AI program.
00:31 Once they showed him how their model could search through platforms like LinkedIn, GitHub
00:35 and Twitter and surface content that Google could not, such as the accounts that most
00:40 frequently replied to Lekhan's tweets, he was impressed enough with the program's accuracy
00:45 to invest.
00:47 He was one of several tech VIPs, including Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, former GitHub
00:52 CEO Nat Friedman, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, and prominent angel investor Elad
00:59 Gill, who got similar personalized demos and collectively invested $3.1 million in a September
01:05 2022 seed round.
01:08 Srinivas told Forbes, "It was very relatable for them to go and search about their own
01:13 Twitter."
01:15 The money gave Srinivas, Yarat, and fellow co-founders Andrew Konwinski and Johnny Ho
01:20 the runway to find an inventive way to bring AI to search.
01:24 After trying out several ideas, they landed on what is now Perplexity, an AI-based conversational
01:30 search engine used by about 15 million people to source and summarize information on any
01:35 topic on the Internet, from the best date night restaurants to white elephant gift exchange
01:40 ideas to the cheapest sneakers for sale online.
01:44 Featured in Forbes' 2024 AI50 list, which was just released last week, Perplexity provides
01:49 succinct answers in four to five sentences along with citations and links to sources
01:54 by routing millions of questions to a medley of large language models, including Anthropx
02:00 Clawed, OpenAI's GPT 3.5 and GPT 4, and open source models like Meta's Lama and Mistral's
02:07 Mixtral.
02:08 Srinivas, who is 29 years old and who serves as Perplexity's CEO, said, "It's almost like
02:14 Wikipedia and ChatGPT had a kid."
02:19 In less than two years, the buzzy AI startup has raised $102 million in venture capital
02:25 from some of the most notable names in tech, including Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, former
02:30 YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Gmail inventor Paul Buchheit, Shopify CEO Toby Luka, and
02:37 former Microsoft president Bob Muglia.
02:40 The roster of prominent backers has helped the startup, now valued at $1 billion, gain
02:45 credibility and momentum while attracting top talent, more investors, and more importantly,
02:51 millions of users, among them billionaires like NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, who uses Perplexity
02:57 every day, and Dell Technologies CEO Michael Dell.
03:01 Srinivas told Forbes, "It creates snowball effects for you.
03:05 People take you more seriously."
03:08 Since launching in December 2022, Perplexity's usage has been on a steep upward climb.
03:14 Some 100,000 users pay a $20 monthly subscription fee to access advanced features on the platform,
03:20 such as searching their own uploaded files and generating images and text from scratch.
03:26 Perplexity users can also create their own so-called AI profile by adding information
03:30 like their occupation, location, likes and dislikes to get personalized answers and suggestions.
03:37 It also lets people restrict their searches to specific databases, including academic
03:41 journals, YouTube, and Reddit.
03:44 The startup, which has about $20 million in annual recurring revenue, is considering adding
03:49 native ads into the product by letting brands influence some of its related questions/suggestions.
03:55 But it still faces the trillion-dollar behemoth that is Google, which remains the first place
04:01 billions of people go looking for information.
04:04 There's still a lot of questions that Google answers better than AI search engines like
04:08 Perplexity, like suggesting what shows or movies to watch or accurately answering questions
04:13 about a recent football game.
04:15 Plus, the tech giant has a two-decade head start on indexing and scraping the web.
04:20 Chernivus said, "You can never succeed at recreating the whole index like Google.
04:25 It's too late.
04:26 It's sort of like finding your way in a maze where you're starting at a huge disadvantage."
04:32 But Chernivus is optimistic because he doesn't see Perplexity as competing directly with
04:36 Google.
04:37 Instead, he hopes that more and more people will turn to Perplexity to find nugget-sized
04:41 information to make quick decisions, rather than being served with 10 rows of blue links.
04:48 Perplexity especially shines for retrieving information that's buried deep within different
04:51 websites, like instructions on tasks like how to renew a passport, or summarizing long
04:56 passages of text like news articles.
04:59 Chernivus said, "Our success doesn't rely on Google's failure at all.
05:04 People can use Google and Perplexity at the same time."
05:09 For full coverage, you can watch our video interview with Aravind Chernivus and check
05:13 out Rashi Srivastava's piece on Forbes.com.
05:17 This is Kieran Meadows from Forbes.
05:20 Thanks for tuning in.
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