Perplexity CEO on Company Outlook, AI Search Engine

I hear the name Perplexity a lot. I know a lot of people use Perplexity and a lot of people talk about Perplexity. Why are you at Jeffrey’s? What do you want to get out of it? This week? I’m excited to meet people here. And you know Perplexity is still not a household name yet. I want it to be used by every person, every organization and it always helps to spread awareness and then get more people excited about Perplexity. There have been reports that you are now a $1 billion valued start up. There is a lot of interest in your capability. Talk to us about the financial health of perplexity right now. I think like what we announced was you know when I when I was there last time here with you the Jeff Bezos round $520 million valuation. We haven’t made an official announcement on a new round yet. We’ll have more to share soon, very shortly. Oh, come back. Talk to us about that for now. What strives are you making? Are people switching from, say, Google as a search engine to you? What do your customers say, Aravind? What they say is like, they’re not viewing us as like, oh, I either use you or Google. They’re still happy to use Google for, like, quickly getting on to like a website. Like, say they just want to go to bloomberg.com. They’re just happy to use Google for that. But let’s say they want to know like what? What is the latest thing going on at Jeffrey’s? Or like, like who are the speakers at this conference that I should be aware of for my business? And these sort of things are what perplexity is more useful for. So they are beginning to see us as a different do and answer engine that’s very useful for directly coming and asking questions and doing your research. And our growth in the United States ever since we announced the funding round last time along with you guys has been like really good. And that’s also translated a lot to growing our revenue because we always wanted to be a tool that’s used by people in the high income countries and that’s beginning to show up in our numbers too. What about your business model? There’s a lot of interesting talk of how well Google itself might start charging for its AI offerings within its enterprise. Are you seeing enterprise adoption for you and you’re thinking about charging? Definitely we are considering it and that’ll be something we’ll be we’ll be sharing soon something more on that. And the way I see it is like lot of companies, lot of people tell me that, you know I wish I can use perplexity at work but my company is banned it. Yes, you know so that’s a problem to solve and we’re going to work on that. Arvin, what’s the challenge right now for a company that is building LLMS and and working at this level. What is your day-to-day that you’re facing? I mean the biggest challenge is honestly the the pace. I wish this field keeps changing every week, right. One point we were all like, GPT 4 is the motto, and it’s like, there’s nothing else that matters. And everyone was like, Oh yeah, and you cannot build on top of them because like, they’re eventually going to do all the product and like, it doesn’t matter. There’s no independence from open AI. And then anthropic puts out clock three and then clock three is even better than GP4, at least the Opus model. And they’re like models, much better than 3.5. It’s cheap, faster. Open source is moving fast, data bricks release the model. That’s like better than 3.5. Mistrals keeps releasing you.