Latest news with #Perplexity
Forbes
3 hours ago
- Business
- Forbes
Perplexity CEO Gives A Key Lesson On Leadership, Competition, And Fear
Aravind Srinivas highlights an overlooked leadership lesson. The modern business environment is undergoing significant volatility and disruptions, requiring CEOs and senior leaders to expand their capacity continually. While much focus in leadership has rightly shifted toward well-being and resilience, one crucial element, often overlooked, can still trip up even the best of executives: fear. Typically, fear is framed as something to conquer, avoid, or eliminate. However, fear doesn't have to be the enemy. It can instead serve as an effective tool sharpening leaders' instincts, accelerating their decisions, and fending off complacency. Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, captured this perspective during a talk at Y Combinator's AI Startup School: "There's real benefit from embracing that fear and sleeping with that fear and waking up every day and feeling excited about what you're going to build because that's the only thing that'll keep you going." This type of perspective is "healthy paranoia." Here are four specific advantages healthy paranoia offers leaders: 1. Healthy Paranoia Sharpens Your Thinking Whether it's a tiger in the wild or a sudden threat to your market share, fear has a universal effect: it sharpens your focus. In moments of real or perceived threats, whether physical, emotional, financial, or strategic, the brain cuts through distractions and focuses on what matters most. For leaders, healthy paranoia channels that same response. It forces sharper thinking and clearer questioning. Where are we vulnerable? What feels safe but isn't? Srinivas articulates this well: 'You should assume OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google will build it too. The only moat is speed.' In an era where ideas and initiatives are easily replicated, speed and continuous refinement have become essential competitive advantages. Rather than fearing imitation, healthy paranoia demands pinpointing the area in which leaders can truly excel and executing relentlessly toward mastery. This kind of thinking drives ruthless prioritization and strategic clarity. 2. Healthy Paranoia Fuels Urgency Without Chaos Healthy paranoia doesn't paralyze, it catapults. Unlike panic-driven urgency that generates chaos, healthy paranoia encourages consistent forward motion rooted in clarity and conviction. Srinivas characterizes running Perplexity as a marathon at "extremely high velocity," emphasizing the need to "move fast and keep shipping." In leadership (and life in general, most of the time), procrastination is natural until the stakes become clear and impossible to ignore. Healthy paranoia distills these stakes and causes decisive action. It shortens the gap between idea and implementation, providing sustained momentum that's deliberate rather than reactive. 3. Healthy Paranoia Prevents Complacency Former New Orleans Saints coach Sean Payton used the phrase "Don't eat the cheese," warning players against succumbing to praise and external validation. Similarly, healthy paranoia protects executives against complacency. Success, while desirable, can breed complacency and even a sense of entitlement, thus diluting urgency. Srinivas intentionally reads comments predicting Perplexity's downfall, acknowledging, "I love reading them. It reminds us that no one is entitled to survive." Leaders who thrive in hyper-competitive and volatile environments never assume safety; they continuously reinforce their competitive edge even in periods of success. 4. Healthy Paranoia Demands Physical And Mental Durability Healthy paranoia isn't purely psychological, as it places substantial demands on a leader's physical, emotional, and mental operating systems. Srinivas frequently engages directly in addressing operational challenges, an approach that requires high stamina and sharp cognitive functioning. In high-stakes and competitive business landscapes, resilience is not a luxury: it is a necessity. It's a non-negotiable. Leaders with audacious goals must maintain a robust physical and mental infrastructure to withstand pressure, remain focused, and continue building while under stress. Healthy paranoia can catapult a leader forward, but only if their internal system can keep pace. Without that foundation, paranoia doesn't sharpen leaders' performance. Instead, it erodes it. Why Healthy Paranoia Is A Leadership Advantage Perspective shapes leadership. Reality exists independently, but our responses to it depend entirely on how we interpret it. For some, fear triggers contraction and defensiveness. For others, it sparks expansion and proactive adaptation. Healthy paranoia, when embraced strategically, becomes an essential asset for leaders, providing more mental acuity, urgency, and vigilance against complacency, while demanding the durability necessary to excel consistently at the highest levels.
Gizmodo
3 hours ago
- Business
- Gizmodo
AI Will Replace Recruiters and Assistants in Six Months, Says CEO Behind ChatGPT Rival
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of the ambitious AI startup Perplexity, has a clear and startling vision for the future of work. It begins with a simple prompt and ends with the automation of entire professional roles. 'A recruiter's work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs,' Srinivas stated in a recent interview with The Verge's Decoder' podcast, a prediction that serves as both a mission statement for his new AI-powered browser, Comet, and a stark warning for the modern knowledge worker. His company is at the forefront of a new technological arms race to build not just a smarter search engine, but a true AI agent. Think of it as a digital entity capable of carrying out complex, multi-step tasks from start to finish. According to Srinivas, the most natural place for this revolution to begin is the one tool every office worker already uses: the web browser. And the first jobs in its sights are those of recruiters and executive assistants. For years, the promise of AI has been to assist, not replace. But the vision Srinivas lays out is one of replacement by a vastly more capable assistant. He describes an AI agent as something that can 'carry out any workflow end to end, from instruction to actual completion of the task.' He details exactly how Comet is being designed to absorb the core functions of a recruiter. The agent can be tasked to find a list of all engineers who studied at Stanford and previously worked at Anthropic, port that list to a Google Sheet with their LinkedIn URLs, find their contact information, and then 'bulk draft personalized cold emails to each of them to reach out to for a coffee chat.' The same logic applies to the work of an executive assistant. By having secure, client-side access to a user's logged-in applications like Gmail and Google Calendar, the agent can take over the tedious back-and-forth of scheduling. 'If some people respond,' Srinivas explains, the agent can 'go and update the Google Sheets, mark the status as responded or in progress and follow up with those candidates, sync with my Google calendar, and then resolve conflicts and schedule a chat, and then push me a brief ahead of the meeting.' This is a fundamental re-imagining of productivity, where the human role shifts from performing tasks to simply defining their outcomes. While Comet cannot execute these most complex, 'long-horizon' tasks perfectly today, Srinivas is betting that the final barriers are about to fall. He is pinning his timeline on the imminent arrival of the next generation of powerful AI. 'I'm betting on progress in reasoning models to get us there,' he says, referencing upcoming models like GPT-5 or Claude 4.5. He believes these new AI brains will provide the final push needed to make seamless, end-to-end automation a reality. His timeline is aggressive and should be a wake-up call for anyone in these professions. 'I'm pretty sure six months to a year from now, it can do the entire thing,' he predicts. This suggests that the disruption isn't a far-off abstract concept but an impending reality that could reshape entire departments before the end of next year. Srinivas's ambition extends far beyond building a better browser. He envisions a future where this tool evolves into something much more integral to our digital lives. 'That's the extent to which we have an ambition to make the browser into something that feels more like an OS where these are processes that are running all the time,' he says. In this new paradigm, the browser is no longer a passive window to the internet but an active, intelligent layer that manages your work in the background. Users could 'launch a bunch of Comet assistant jobs' and then, as Srinivas puts it, spend their time on other things while the AI works. This transforms the very nature of office work from a series of active inputs to a process of delegation and oversight. What happens to the human worker when their job functions are condensed into a single prompt? Srinivas offers an optimistic view, suggesting that this newfound efficiency will free up humanity's time and attention. He believes people will spend more time on leisure and personal enrichment, that they will 'choose to spend it on entertainment more than intellectual work.' In his vision, AI does the drudgery, and we get more time to 'chill and scroll through X or whatever social media they like.' But this utopian view sidesteps the more immediate and painful economic question: What happens to the millions of people whose livelihoods are built on performing the very tasks these agents are designed to automate? While some may be elevated to the role of 'AI orchestrator,' many could face displacement. The AI agent, as described by one of its chief architects, is not merely a new feature. It is a catalyst for a profound and potentially brutal transformation of the white-collar workforce. The future of work is being written in code, and according to Srinivas, the first draft will be ready far sooner than most of us think.
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Business Standard
7 hours ago
- Business Standard
Worldwide, it's an artificial intelligence-powered way to browse the web
Next-gen browsers are poised to redefine online interaction, challenging Chrome's reign New Delhi Listen to This Article The web browser, the ubiquitous software enabling access to the internet, has remained unchanged in its core purpose of fetching and displaying online content for decades. That's now changing as tech giants bring the power of artificial intelligence (AI) to the browser. Alphabet's Google Chrome is by far the top browser, holding more than 70 per cent market share and boasting over 3 billion users. Chrome's dominance and how people interact with the internet are set to change with the arrival of AI browsers: Perplexity's Comet and OpenAI's reported offering. Since its public launch in 2008, Chrome has fended off
Mint
7 hours ago
- Business
- Mint
Doomscrolling on Instagram? Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has a message for youngsters
Perplexity AI's Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Aravind Srinivas has called on youngsters to stop wasting time on doomscrolling on social media and spend more time on Artificial intelligence (AI). "Spend less time doomscrolling on Instagram; spend more time using the AIs," Srinivas said in an interview with technology enthusiast Matthew Berman that was published on Thursday. "Not because we want your usage, but simply because that's your way to, like, add value to the new society," he added. AI chip giant Nvidia-backed Perplexity (the AI-powered search and answer engine that offers real-time responses to users in a conversational language) is positioning itself to challenge the dominance of Alphabet's Google. Aravind Srinivas also said that some people would lose their jobs because AI would reduce head counts across industries, but those who will master AI tools will have the advantage in the job market. "People who really are at the frontier of using AIs are going to be way more employable than people who are not," the Perplexity CEO said. "That's guaranteed to happen." Raising a concern that most people are struggling to keep up with AI, Srinivas said: "Human race has never been extremely fast at adapting." "This is truly testing the limits in terms of how fast we can adapt, especially with a piece of technology that's evolving every three months or six months," he added. Srinivas further said: "Either the other people who lose jobs end up starting companies themselves and make use of AIs, or they end up learning the AIs and contribute to new companies." Perplexity is in talks with mobile phone makers to pre-install its new Comet AI browser on smartphones, Aravind Srinivas told Reuters on Friday. The move is likely to boost the AI startup's reach by capitalising on browser "stickiness". "It's not easy to convince mobile OEMs to change the default browser to Comet from Chrome," Srinivas said. Currently, Comet is in beta version and available only on desktops. It integrates Perplexity's AI directly into web browsing, allowing users to ask questions about personal data such as emails, calendars, or browsing history, and even perform tasks such as scheduling meetings or summarising webpages.
Time of India
8 hours ago
- Business
- Time of India
Airtel-Perplexity deal gives the AI giant an entry into India market
Academy Empower your mind, elevate your skills Indian telecom giant Bharti Airtel announced a partnership with artificial intelligence (AI) major Perplexity which provides all Airtel customers (mobile, broadband, and DTH) with a free 12-month subscription to Perplexity Pro, a search and answer engine subscription usually priced at about Rs 17,000 per year marks Perplexity's first partnership with an Indian telecom company, giving the former access to Airtel's 360 million users to spread its international footprint. Pro offers features like access to models like GPT 4.1 and Claude, deep research and analysis tools and image AI company, which has been seeking to take on Big Tech giants in AI and recently, Google through its AI-powered search engine, gets a new and diverse the app to such a wide userbase also boosts Perplexity's visibility and adoption. This was clear when the app went to the top of the downloads list on Apple's App Store after the deal, overtaking competitors like also helps Perplexity strengthen its footprint in India's rapidly growing AI user market, while jointly innovating AI service delivery with Airtel. Perplexity benefits from a distribution and monetisation model through Airtel's network, enhancing user stickiness and driving AI usage across multiple customer segments, from students and professionals to of the major telecom companies in India, Airtel is demonstrating a new approach in telecom offerings by throwing in a GenAI productivity tool. This goes beyond the traditional OTT content and entertainment deals offered by telcos, and moves toward practical, AI-powered utility services that add value to customers' daily digital also plans to gain insights into how customers interact with advanced AI tools, which will show the company how to embed intelligence deeper into its service layers, eventually enhancing and personalising its product ecosystem.
