20VC: Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas on Will Foundation Models Commoditise, Diminishing Returns in Model Performance, OpenAI vs Anthropic: Who Wins & Why the Next Breakthrough in Model Performance will be in Reasoning
The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
The Twenty Minute VC
4.4 • 637 Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2024
⏱️ 55 minutes
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Summary
Aravind Srinivas is the Co-Founder & CEO of Perplexity, the conversational "answer engine" that provides precise, user-focused answers to queries. Aravind co-founded the company in 2022 after working as a research scientist at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. To date, Perplexity has raised over $100 million from investors including Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Elad Gil, and Susan Wojciki.
In Today’s Episode with Aravind Srinivas We Discuss:
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Biggest Lessons from DeepMind & OpenAI
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What was the best career advice Sam Altman @ OpenAI gave Aravind?
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What were Aravind’s biggest takeaways at DeepMind?
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How did DeepMind shape how Aravind built Perplexity?
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What did Aravind mean by “competition is for losers?” What did he learn about talent assembly at DeepMind?
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The Next AI Breakthrough: Reasoning
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Does Aravind think we are experiencing diminishing returns on compute & model performance?
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Does Aravind agree reasoning will be the next big breakthrough for models?
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What are the reasons Aravind thinks models suck at reasoning today?
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What is the timeline for reasoning improvement according to Aravind?
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What does Aravind think are the biggest misconceptions about AI today?
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Will Foundation Models Commoditise?
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Does Aravind think foundation models will commoditise? What will the end state of foundation models look like?
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Why does Aravind think the second tier models will get commoditised?
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Why does Aravind think the subscription model will not work for AI models with true reasoning?
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Why does Aravind think the application layer companies will benefit from foundation models commoditising?
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Why does Aravind think foundation models will not verticalize?
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When does Aravind think is the right time to go enterprise? What is his strategy to differentiate Perplexity from its competitors?
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AI Arms Race: Who Will Win?
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Who does Aravind think will be the winners of foundation models?
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What do AI companies need to do to win the model arms race?
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How does Aravind think startups can compete against incumbents' infinite cash flow?
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What are the reasons Aravind thinks Perplexity’s browsing is better than ChatGPT?
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What is Aravind’s biggest challenge at Perplexity today?
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Today's models are just giving you the output. |
| 0:02.1 | Tomorrow's models will start with an output, reason, elicit feedback from the world, go back, improve the reasoning. |
| 0:09.2 | That is the beginning of, I would say, the real reasoning era, the biggest beneficiaries of the commoditization of foundation models of the application layer companies. |
| 0:18.0 | This is 20VC with me, Harry Stebbings, and what a show we have for you today with Aravind Shrinivas, co-founder and CEO at Perplexity. As Gary Tan described it in a tweet, Perplexity is actually just better than Google for clear, well-sighted answers. The companies raised over $100 million to date, from the lights of Jeff Bezos, Nat Friedman, Eli Gill, and many more |
| 0:38.6 | incredible investors. And prior to perplexity, Aravind cut his teeth at Open A.I. And deep |
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... |
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