Does Perplexity’s “answer engine” threaten Google?  

When Aravind Srinivas was accepted at the University of California, Berkeley, to do a PhD, his mother was disappointed. Like many Indian parents, she wanted him to go to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. But things worked out after all; on the west coast he interned at OpenAI and Google’s DeepMind, both of which became leaders in generative artificial intelligence (AI). With that experience, he co-founded Perplexity, a generative-AI startup recently valued at $1bn that provides fast, Wikipedia-like responses to search queries. He is an unassuming interviewee, but an ambitious one. His “answer engine” is aimed at competing with Google search, one of the best business models of all time. Think Martin Luther taking on the Catholic church.