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- [00:00]
Host
Indiana University strengthens tomorrow's workforce with practical, real world experience. IU grads make a difference in your community, serving as teachers, nurses and engineers who rise to tomorrow's challenges and meet them. Learn more at iu.edu impact,
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Interviewer
Bloomberg Audio Studios Podcasts, Radio News it's not just
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Host
chip makers pitching the future of computing At Computex, Perplexity took the stage with int to unveil what it calls the world's first hybrid local server agentic inference orchestrator. A phrase that sounds like it was generated by AI itself. Here with more Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas Aravin. It's great to have you back on the show. I spent all morning thinking about how do I explain this? And basically the Orchestrator is there. It's a piece of software to decide whether a or a part of an AI workload is best done locally, on device, at the edge, or if it needs the superior computing of cloud server. Is that right? Have I kind of nailed what you're, what you're trying to solve for here?
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Aravind Srinivas
That's correct. So yeah, thank you for having me again. And that is exactly correct. You don't want all your compute centralized in gigantic servers and everything running through the largest frontier models. You're already reading reports of how people are freaking out about their token costs. Some people are spending half a billion dollars per month per engineer. What you actually want is efficient token value per watt per user. And that requires orchestrating, privacy, accuracy, intelligence and cost all together in one single unified system. And that orchestration capability requires hybrid model between server side and the local. And that's what we demoed today with Intel. And we are actually chip agnostic. So our solution works with intel, it works with Nvidia rtx. So we just like how we've been model agnostic. We plan to be chip agnostic here.
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Host
That's interesting. So my next question was going to be why Intel? You know, what is it about Intel's role in the the APC market and on the server side that makes it work? But if you're agnostic, what's the breakthrough that you've cracked? Like if you've written the software, what is it you've managed to achieve in how those workloads are diverted? Okay, go, go a bit further.
- [02:36]
Aravind Srinivas
So like I said, you want, you want one single system to route across models, files, tools, chips, servers, and decide when to use which model or when to use your local file system, your local sub agent model, your local LLM, or when to use a frontier model for depending on the task and the prompt, or depending on the confidentiality and sensitivity of your files or apps. That requires you to make clever orchestration decisions, balance trade offs between accuracy and costs. And that's what we're doing in our software and computer. Essentially an operating system that balances all these different objectives simultaneously.
- [03:17]
Interviewer
I mean you sit in such an interesting place as an orchestrator, whether it be letting people use your own in house models, whether it's using a mix of third party models. And the third party models are up to a lot right now. I just want to get your take on how you feel about competitive moats or competitive threats. If these big companies Anthropic OpenAI Space X will go public in the next few months.
- [03:41]
Aravind Srinivas
We actually love anthropic OpenAI Xi, all these frontier labs. Every time any of their AI gets better, our unified system also gets better because we route across all of them. We basically think of Perplexity Computer as taking the best of all AI and putting it together in one single unified interface and system. So all of you know how much Anthropic models have improved since the beginning of the year. What has it led to for us? Our revenue actually tripled since the beginning of the year. It's just been five months in the year and our revenue is already tripled to what? That, that. So we're actually like very happy with all these companies progress and they completely deserve their IPOs. So we're very excited for them. Yeah.
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Interviewer
Can I follow up to. Are you able to just discuss what that revenues jump to? There were reports in the FTSE that you're up to about $450 million just in the month of March.
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Aravind Srinivas
Yeah, we crossed that. I think I publicly tweeted that we crossed 500 million about some somewhere around mid April. We are announcing new numbers yet, but we are doing really well.
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Host
Irvin, I've been thinking a lot about where Perplexity sits in the suite of available tools and technologies. Right. Research seems to be a really interesting place with Perplexity. And I'm wondering like how you measure the engagement on the platform. So like it's not just like one query and done, but do you kind of track the time that an individual desk or user would stick with one query as sort of indication of success, you know, how the platform's being used, the behaviors of the user base.
- [05:23]
Aravind Srinivas
So we are actually not trying to maximize engagement per user in the sense we're not actually trying to keep them longer on the platform. Something in fact accuracy is somewhat towards the opposite end of that, if you give the user an accurate answer in the first turn, it's likely that they're not going to continue in the same chat. What we actually look at is retentive uses if the same user is using perplexity for a lot more research tasks, not just that one single task it came with. And that's, that's always been the case. For example, we introduced a max plan and that's already like, you know, at the beginning of the year in terms of subscription split between the max plan, that is a $200 a month plan versus the pro plan was something like 9 is to 91. Today it's more like 30 to 70. So I think that that already shows that there are these power users who are willing to pay like $2,000 a year out of pocket. This is not even enterprise because they love the superior research and orchestration and accuracy that we bring in in our product.
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Host
Interesting.
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Interviewer
So we're seeing the growth. You're talking about your average revenue run rate tripling, going up to almost $500 million. I'm interested as to where the combative nature does come in because it looks like you're playing well with all the other players out there. But there is some issues in the courts in particular. Cnn, for example, has just the latest to hit you with a lawsuit alleging that you violated federal copyright laws. How are you dealing with how people get paid and what you train upon and what you feed and source to us as a user?
- [07:02]
Aravind Srinivas
I mean, the fact of the matter is that like nobody has any copyright over truth and facts. Like I think we've been consistent with our position. We are very confident in our position and we will let the legal process, you know, decide what the right thing is in that particular situation. I don't want to comment further on that, but nobody has any copyright over truth in facts.
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Interviewer
Perplexity CEO staying up late. It is like 11:30pm with you. We so appreciate you coming after your. Yeah, jet lag works worldwide of our safe flight back from Taiwan. We appreciate it.
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