A few days ago,Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas talks to YC General Partner David Lieb at Y Combinator's AI Startup Academy event about the impact of AI on the future of the internet, browsers, and changes.
The pair opened by talking about Perplexity's current direction - the browser, which Aravind said is a big bet for the company's future. Aravind said that the browser is the company's big bet for the future, explaining as best as he could to the public "why Perplexity when you're looking at other search engines, AI apps," he said:
Because we're investing our efforts into verticals where, even though the others are involved, they're just using search as one of the layers of the application, and we're going to be better in that area.
Aravind believes that browsers and intelligences are the next direction we really want to bet on."We see it as an assistant, not as a fully autonomous intelligence."Aravind points out that what Perplexity is doing now is just as exciting as it was when Google Chrome had separate processes for each tab.
It's worth noting that Perplexity recently launched its own official AI Browser Comet, the main core function of Perplexity's AI Search EngineThe search engine has been designed to provide users with access to AI-generated search summaries.
Continuing with Comet and the company's development ideas, Aravind also explains why it chose the browser path: the browser no longer requires users to worry about memorization, personalization, or any other such features, but rather it actively remembers them, sets them up, and does a lot of things a chatbot can't do on its own.