Perplexity CEO: Models will become increasingly commoditized

A while back, Aravind Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, had an in-depth conversation with MBA student Aislin Roth at Stanford Business School. During the interview, Aislin Roth asked that Perplexity owns neither content nor models. What are its technical barriers? And why is Perplexity's approach better than direct vertical integration? Aravind Srinivas responded, "We're convinced of one thing: models are becoming more and more commoditized. If you want to be a model provider, you need huge amounts of capital to back it up and you need to risk losing billions of dollars a year. We are neither in a position to do that, nor do we want to go down that road. So we decided to use existing models and optimize them for the end-user search experience. And, Aravind Srinivas adds, there's a lot more that can be done outside of the model, and we felt that building a differentiated business was totally worth it. Ultimately, most successful businesses are some form of 'packaging tool'.