Is this man a Google killer?

Perplexity and founder Aravind Srinivas are using AI to reshape how people find information online. They're forcing giants like Google and Apple to figure out how to beat them—or buy them.

- BY JEREMY KAHN

ACOLYTE TO RIVAL Srinivas admired Google and interned at its AI labs before becoming a competitor.

ARAVIND SRINIVAS wanted a simple answer. If Google had given him one, things might have turned out differently—for Srinivas and for Google.

It was the fall of 2022, weeks before OpenAI would debut its viral AI chatbot, ChatGPT. Srinivas, then 28, was an ambitious AI researcher with a PhD from UC Berkeley and prestigious internships at OpenAI and Google's AI labs under his belt, plus a year working full-time for OpenAI after earning his doctorate. Now he'd left that plum job to launch a startup with three cofounders, all AI experts. Exactly what this startup would do, however, was a bit unclear.

While they were still trying to decide, Srinivas and his cofounders hired their first engineer—and that engineer needed health insurance. Srinivas had never picked an insurance provider before and had no idea how to go about it. So, like most people would, he asked Google: What is the best health insurance plan for a startup? Which HR software provides the best value for money? He quickly became frustrated with the results: The top links were all ads from insurance companies or SEO-optimized marketing content.

But a better alternative was sitting at Srinivas's fingertips. One of the business ideas he and his cofounders had been playing around with was an AI tool that would use a large language model (LLM) to summarize information from multiple websites. The founders had even built a prototype. Srinivas remembers thinking, “'Let’s at least ask this tool that we have.' And it started answering all these questions really well for us.” Not only did the prototype help him find insurance, it also gave Srinivas his startup’s mission.