Aravind Srinivas: from a windowless coworking space to taking on Apple
Eighteen months ago I met him in a windowless room in San Francisco. Today the Perplexity founder is taking on Google and Apple – and stands for the dynamism AI has unleashed in Silicon Valley.
Eighteen months ago I met Aravind Srinivas in a windowless room in a San Francisco coworking space. Today he is taking on Apple and Google. To me, he is the perfect example of the remarkable dynamism artificial intelligence has unleashed in Silicon Valley.
🌍 Perplexity: the background
Aravind did his PhD in computer science at Berkeley and then worked at OpenAI. There he spotted a problem: OpenAI can train its systems on huge volumes of data, but cannot reliably distinguish between different qualities of data. That was the entry point when he founded Perplexity in August 2022.
📊 Perplexity: a new approach to AI search
Perplexity focuses on assessing the quality of data. The platform names sources for its conclusions and combines different AI models – not only from OpenAI but also from Anthropic. Perplexity has also built a censorship-free variant of DeepSeek.
📉 Perplexity: Apple and Google are struggling with AI
Aravind also identified a major weakness in the tech giants: Apple has pushed the launch of an AI-powered Siri to next year – a clear warning signal. Google has powerful models but is reluctant to roll them out at scale, in order not to endanger its own advertising business.
📱 Perplexity: attack on Apple & Google with Deutsche Telekom
Perplexity wants to reach end users with AI solutions itself. Alongside an online platform there is now a partnership with Deutsche Telekom: an AI smartphone with Perplexity built in is coming to market. The goal is a personal assistant that takes over many tasks automatically.
🤖 Perplexity: not yet perfect – but with potential
I tested the system at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. When trying to book a table at a restaurant, I was only redirected to the booking page – I had to enter everything manually. Aravind promises that this will run automatically through API integrations in the future.
📊 Perplexity: the calculus behind the Deutsche Telekom partnership
Deutsche Telekom celebrates the cooperation as the start of the AI era. Aravind sees it primarily as a chance to access customer data, in order to offer personalised AI assistants. Understandable – he competes with Apple and Google. But the question remains: is Deutsche Telekom really willing to share that much customer data?
I wrote the full piece for Handelsblatt.