The story of AI, particularly large language models (LLMs), has been a journey from rudimentary rule-based systems to the sophisticated, human-like conversational agents we see today.
This progression began with early steps in Natural Language Processing (NLP) back in the mid-20th century. By the 1980s, the field shifted towards statistical models, and the 1990s brought significant advancements with Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) and the groundbreaking arrival of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM).
These innovations dramatically enhanced AI's capacity to process sequential data and comprehend complex, longer sentences.
The true revolution, however, began to accelerate in the 2010s with Google Brain in 2011 and the seminal "Attention is All You Need" paper from Google in 2017, which introduced the Transformer architecture.
This architecture, with its self-attention mechanisms, revolutionized LLMs by making them faster, smarter, and more powerful, laying the groundwork for the deep learning era that truly took off around 2018 with models like BERT and the groundbreaking GPT series powering OpenAI's ChatGPT.
This slow burn of innovation exploded into a full-blown arms race when people began to realize the power of LLM-powered generative AIs.
In this rapidly evolving landscape, Aravind Srinivas, the CEO and co-founder of Perplexity, has emerged as a significant figure, guiding his company through the exhilarating, and at times terrifying, currents of the AI revolution.
Aravind Srinivas challenges Google's search dominance by offering a fundamentally different approach to information access.
He argues that Google's ad-driven model inherently conflicts with a truly AI-first experience, where users get direct, cited answers instead of a list of links. Srinivas believes Google's "business model constraints" prevent it from fully embracing AI's potential for seamless, agentic information retrieval.
Perplexity's core idea, exemplified by its new AI-native browser Comet, is to integrate AI intelligence directly into the Browse experience.
Unlike traditional search, Comet aims to provide "clarity, speed, and trust" by showing sources and explaining reasoning, prioritizing users over advertisers. Srinivas also criticizes Google's "giant bureaucratic organization" for hindering its pace of innovation compared to Perplexity's agility.
He sees the future not just as improved search, but as a complete rethinking of human-machine collaboration, where AI acts as a thinking partner that anticipates needs and explains complex topics.
While acknowledging that Google will likely copy good ideas, Srinivas believes Perplexity's user-centric, AI-native approach, unburdened by legacy revenue models, will ultimately give it an edge in this "Browser War III."
As a leader of a company, trying to face a tech giant with decades-worth of domination, is not an easy task.
During his speech at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School, Srinivas said that:
"You’ve got to live with that fear and you have to embrace it. Realize that your mode comes from moving fast and building your own identity around what you’re doing because users at the end care."
In other words, instead to let the pressure paralyze him, Srinivas chooses to embrace it. He uses fear to fuel his ambition.
As a founder of a tech company that is moving in an increasingly competitive space, this means operating with an unyielding sense of urgency. The pressure is relentless: investors expect significant returns, rivals are always on the prowl, and the possibility of someone else launching your core idea to market first is a constant, looming threat.
Srinivas method is to preserve his unique vision from competitors who might replicate and even surpass it can be an even greater hurdle. He believes that the constant threat of competition should be a powerful motivator.
For Srinivas, embracing this fear has been instrumental in building Perplexity into a multi-billion-dollar AI-powered search engine.
It now stands as a formidable rival, innovating alongside tech giants like Google and Microsoft, as well as formidable newcomers such as OpenAI and Anthropic. Perplexity's rapid success hasn't gone unnoticed; Apple has even reportedly engaged in talks about acquiring the company.
He even spearheaded Comet, an agentic AI-powered browser that Google Chrome could only wish of becoming.