Aravind Srinivas

Aravind Srinivas (born 1994) is an Indian-American entrepreneur from Chennai. After degrees from IIT Madras and a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley, he worked as a research scientist at OpenAI before co-founding Perplexity AI in 2022 with Denis Yarats, Johnny Ho, and Andy Konwinski. The company’s product answers questions directly, in prose, with inline citations — a deliberate challenge to the ten-blue-links model that made Google the front door of the internet.

Gunning for the search engine

Srinivas describes search as an “AI complete” problem — one you can only truly solve by solving AI itself — and has been explicit that Perplexity’s ambition is to become what people reach for instead of a search engine. He preaches obsession with answer correctness, speed, and readability, and the company grew from a demo bot to hundreds of millions of queries a month, a browser (Comet), and a valuation in the tens of billions.

The rise has not been friction-free. In 2024, Forbes and Wired accused Perplexity of paraphrasing and scraping publishers’ journalism without adequate credit, and News Corp’s Dow Jones sued the company that October over its use of news content. Perplexity responded with revenue-sharing publisher programs, while Srinivas defended the answer-engine model as ultimately good for publishers and users alike. The dispute made him a central figure in the fight over how AI products should compensate the sources they summarize.

Unapologetically bullish, Srinivas urges young people to spend less time doomscrolling and more time learning to use AI — arguing the people who master the tools will be the ones who benefit from them.