Hey there. It's Stephen Dubner. About a year and a half ago, we published an

episode called Is Google getting worse?

We talked about Google's near monopoly over internet search, and we looked at a startup called

Niva that was trying to compete against Google.

Well, Niva has already shut down, so maybe it will be impossible to dislodge Google.

Or, maybe not.

Since we put out that episode, a new kind of competitor has emerged.

Search engines powered by artificial intelligence.

You've probably already heard about chat gPT, but the one I was interested in hearing

more about is called

perplexity. So today we are going to replay that earlier Google

episode but first I'd like you to hear a new conversation we just

recorded with this would be rival.

Google created the greatest business model on the internet.

It just has to be rethought.

That is Aravand Shrinivas.

I'm the co-founder and CEO of perplexity.

Proplexity is what?

Describe it to someone who like a grandmother, an uncle,

someone who doesn't know a whole lot about how this works?

Proplexity is a conversational answer engine.

So you ask you a question and it just gives you the answers and it also tells you

...