On December 7, 2022, seven days after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a former OpenAI research scientist named Aravind Srinivas, who had left the company three months earlier, launched an AI chatbot called Perplexity. “Everyone was obsessed with ChatGPT. We were the only product that came up and said, references and quotes are important. So, from the beginning, we cared about you.” Srinivas, founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, said during an interview on stage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on October 30.
Lately, Perplexity has been in a lot of hot water over a problem that Srinivas set out to fix two years ago. Last month, the company was sued by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, both owned by News Corp, for plagiarizing their content in search results. A few days earlier, the New York Times sent a “cease and desist” notice to the first party requires them to stop using the newspaper's content on its site.
Confusion is at the forefront of so-called AI answer engines, which aim to answer specific user questions by summarizing information from the Internet, instead of providing links that answer a few key words. Srinivas said the average query entered into Perplexity's answer engine is 10 to 11 words, compared to two to three words for Google Search, suggesting that users come to Perplexity with more well-thought-out questions.
Srinivas said Perplexity “always speaks to its sources” and “does not claim ownership of any content.” “Presenting content on the web, summarizing it in a way that the user can digest and then giving it to you at the source of all this information,” he said, adding that it is exactly the same as how journalists do their job and therefore it should not be. check for cheating.
However, he acknowledged that, like other rapidly evolving AI applications, Perplexity's current security roadblocks are not perfect and could easily be bypassed using rapid engineering—a fancy term that describes the practice of designing inputs for AI tools that will produce better results.
The new lawsuit filed against Perplexity claims the AI company is competing with its own audience using copyrighted content. But Srinivas said Perplexity users don't come to the app to consume daily news, but “to understand what's going on.”
“How, how does that news affect me? On a related note, should I continue to buy more Nvidia stock? These are not the kind of questions you would ask TechCrunch, but you would ask Perplexity,” said the CEO.
Recognizing that reported stories are critical to making the Perplexity brand valuable, earlier this year, the company launched a unique program to share advertising revenue with news publishers. It currently works with Time, Fortune and the German website Der Spiegel.
But ultimately, Srinivas believes that no one should be entitled to the facts. “Our belief is that the facts need to be shared with everyone,” he said. “Imagine a world where scientists say they own a certain truth, and other people can't say it. Knowledge and truth cannot be spread this way.”
Srinivas, who is originally from India and holds a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, was a researcher at DeepMind and Google. Before founding Perplexity, he was a research scientist at OpenAI for a year.
