Pod Insights Decoder Perplexity CEO on why the browser is AI's killer app About this episode This is Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge. Nilay’s out on parental leave for the next few months, so I’ll be stepping in to host our Thursday episodes while he’s out. My guest today is Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is betting that the browser is where more useful AI will get built.
Perplexity just released Comet, an AI web browser for the Mac and Windows that’s still in an invite-only beta. I’ve been using it, and it’s very interesting. In this conversation, Aravind and I also discussed the future of Perplexity, the AI talent wars, and why he thinks people will eventually pay thousands of dollars for a single AI prompt.
Read the full transcript here on The Verge.
Links:
Perplexity just launched an AI web browser | Verge
Perplexity wants to buy Chrome if Google has to sell it | Verge
The Dia browser is a big bet on the. web and AI | Verge
Perplexity’s CEO on fighting Google & the AI browser war | Command Line
Perplexity launches a $200 monthly subscription plan | Verge
Meta says it’s winning the talent war with OpenAI | Verge
Meta is trying to win the AI race with money | Verge
Meta held talks to buy Perplexity and others | Command Line
Inside Mark Zuckerberg’s AI hiring spree | Command Line
Perplexity is ready to take on Google | Command Line
Credits:
Decoder is a production of The Verge and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network.
Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Statt. Our editor is Ursa Wright.
The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder.
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Transcript 9,394 words · 11 speakers
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1:25 Speaker 04 Welcome to Decoder. I'm Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and author of the Command Line newsletter. I'm hosting our Thursday episodes while Neelai is out on parental leave. Today, we're talking about how AI is changing the way we use the web. If you're like me, you're probably already using apps like ChatGPT to search for things. But lately, I've become very interested in the future of the web browser itself. That brings me to my guest today. Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas is betting that the browser is where more useful AI will get built. He just released Comet, an AI web browser for the Mac and Windows that's still in an invite-only beta. I've been using it, and it's pretty interesting.
2:07 Speaker 04 Aravind's not alone here. OpenAI is also working on its own web browser. And then there are other AI-native web browsers out there like DIA from the browser company. Then there's Google, which may be forced to spin off Chrome if the US Department of Justice prevails in its big antitrust case. If that happens, it could provide an opening for startups like Perplexity to win market share and fundamentally change how more people interact with the web.
2:35 Speaker 04 In this conversation, Aravind and I also discussed the future of Perplexity, the AI talent wars, and why he thinks people will eventually pay thousands of dollars for a single AI prompt. I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Here we go.
3:04 Speaker 04 Aravind, before we get into Comet and how it works, I actually want to go back to our last conversation in April for my newsletter command line. We were talking about why you were doing this. And you told me at the time that the reason we're doing the browser is, quote, "It might be the best way to build agents." And that idea has stuck with me since then, and I think it's been validated by others and some other recent launches. But before we get into things, can you just expand on that idea? Why you think the browser is actually the route to an AI agent?
3:41 Speaker 05 Sure. What is an AI agent? Let's start from there. A rough description of what people want out of an AI agent is something that can actually go and do stuff for you. It's very vague, obviously, just like how an AI chatbot is vague by definition. People just want it to do, like, respond to anything. The same thing is true for agents. It should be able to carry out any workflow, end-to-end, from instruction to actually completion of the task. Okay, then you boil that down to what does it actually need to do it? It needs context, right? It needs to pull in context from your third Third-party apps, it needs to go and like take actions on those third-party apps on your behalf. So you need logged-in versions of your third-party apps.
4:27 Speaker 05 You need to access your your data from those third-party apps, but do it in a way where it doesn't actually constantly ask you to art again and again. It doesn't actually need your permission to do a lot of the things. At the same time, you can take over it and do it, complete the things when it's not able to do it because no AI agent is foolproof. Especially when we are at a time and reasoning models is still like far from perfection, right? So you want this one interface that the agent and the human can both operate in in the same manner. Their logins are actually seamless, client-side data is easy to use. And controlling it is pretty natural. Nothing is gonna like truly be damaging if something doesn't work.
5:10 Speaker 05 You can still take over from the agent and like like complete it when you feel like it's not able to do it. What is that environment in which this can be done in the most straightforward way without creating virtual servers with all your logins and like having users worry about privacy and stuff like that? It's the browser. Everything can live on the client side, everything can stay secure. It only accesses information that it needs to complete the task. In the literal same way you access those websites yourself. That way you get to understand what the agent is doing. It's not like a black box. You get full transparency and visibility. And you can just stop the agent when you when you feel like it's going off the rails and just complete the task yourself. And you can also like have the agent ask for your permission to do anything. So that level of control, transparency, trust
5:56 Speaker 05 in an environment that we're used to for like multiple decades, which is the browser, such a familiar front end to introduce some a new concept of AIs going and doing things for you. Makes perfect sense for us to reimagine the browser.
6:08 Speaker 04 How did you go about building Comet? When I first opened it, it felt familiar. It felt like Chrome and my understanding it's built on Chromium, the open source kind of substrate of Chrome that Google maintains. And that allows you to have a lot of easy data importing. I was struck when I first opened it that it only took one click to basically bring all my contacts from Chrome over to Comet, even my extensions. So why decide to go that route, build it on Chromium versus doing something fully from scratch?
6:39 Speaker 05 First of all, Chromium is a great contribution to the world, right? Most of the things they did on reimagining tabs as processes, the way they've gone about like security, encryption, and like just the performance, the core backend performance of Chromium as an engine, rendering engines that they have is all like really good. Like, there's no need to reinvent that. And at the same time, it's an open source project, so it's easy to hire developers for Perplexity. They can come work on the Comet browser, especially if it's something that has open standards. And we want to continue contributing to Chromium ourselves, so we don't want to just consume Chromium and build a product out of it, but we actually want to give back to the ecosystem. So that's natural.
7:23 Speaker 05 And the second thing is like, it's the dominant browser right now, like Chrome. And almost, if you actually include Edge, which is also Chromium fork, DuckDogo, Brave, they're all like Chromium forks. Only Safari is based on WebKit. So it's actually the dominant browser, and there's no need to like reinvent the wheel here. In terms of UI, we felt like it would be better to retain the most familiar UI people already are used to, which honestly is the Chrome UI. Safari's a slightly different UI, and some people like it, some people do not. And it's still like a much smaller share of the market. And imports need to work, otherwise like you're gonna be like, "Oh, this is not working, oh, that thing has all my personal contacts, I'm missing out on it.
8:07 Speaker 05 I don't want to go through the friction of logging into all the apps again." I think that that was very important for us, for the onboarding step, which is not only onboarding you as a human, but also onboarding the AI. Because the moment you're already logged into all the third-party apps that you are logged in on Chrome, in the exact same security standards, the agent gets access to that on your client and can immediately show you the magic of the product.
8:33 Speaker 04 And the agent is seeing it, but you, Perplexity, are not. You're not using all of the Chrome data I instantly bring over to train on me or anything like that.
8:43 Speaker 05 No, the agent only sees it when you ask a prompt relevant to, for example, based on what I've ordered on Amazon in the last month, recommend me some new supplements or like go and order the magnesium supplement that I've already ordered frequently on Amazon. The agent only sees that for that one singular prompt and doesn't actually store your entire Amazon history on our servers. And you can always like ensure that like your prompts get deleted from our servers. So even the prompts we can choose not to look at, even for like, you know, let's say, fine tuning purposes. Let's say we want to like make our agents good for like so at an aggregate or like users have done Amazon shopping queries. So let's go and like make it better on that. We don't even need to look at that if you choose to like not retain your prompt.
9:29 Speaker 05 So that's the level of privacy and security we want to offer. At the same time, the frontier intelligence is all on the server side. Like this is one of the main reasons why Apple is struggling to ship all like Apple intelligence, be it on iOS or macOS or whatever, right? Because I think there's generally like an expectation that everything needs to live on the client side. That's not necessary to be privately. You can still be pretty secure and private with frontier intelligence on the server. So that's the architecture we brought in on Comet.
9:56 Speaker 04 We're talking now a couple of weeks or so after Comet came out and it's still invite only, or I think it's also restricted to your, your premium tier, your 200 a month tier. But you've been tweeting a lot of examples of how people have been using it. They've been using it to make Facebook ads, do FedEx customer support chat, run their smart home accessories, make Facebook marketplace listings, schedule calendar meetings. There's been a lot of stuff that you've shown. I'm curious what-
10:26 Speaker 05 Unsubscribe, unsubscribing from spam emails, which is a favorite use case of a lot of people.
10:32 Speaker 04 So maybe that's the one, but I was going to say, what has been the, the main use case you've seen so far that people are finding with Comet?
10:39 Speaker 05 Actually, while these are the more glamorous use cases, I would say the boring dominant one is always invoking the sidecar and having it do stuff for you on the webpage you're on. Not necessarily just simple summarization, but more complex questions like you're on a, let's say I'm watching Alex Hill's podcast with Zuckerberg or something, and I want to know specifically what he said about a topic. And I want to take that and send it as a message to my teammates on Slack. I think that's the thing you can just invoke the assistant on the side and do it instantly. It's connected to your Gmail, your calendar. It's also able to pull the transcript from the YouTube video. It has fine-grained access. It's not, and it's immediately able to retrieve the relevant snippet.
11:23 Speaker 05 I can even ask it to play it from that exact time step instead of going through the entire transcript and like, you know, control effing like whatever I want. That is the level of advantage you have. Like, it almost feels like you should never watch a YouTube video standalone anymore unless you have a lot of time on your hands. And it's fantastic, right? And people use it for LinkedIn. Like, honestly, searching over LinkedIn is very hard. They don't have a working search engine, basically. So the agent figures out all these shortcuts, like how we figure out using these filters, people search, a connection search, and it's able to give recruiting power that was never possible before. I would say it's better than using LinkedIn Premium.
12:03 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I'm glad you brought up the sidebar because for people who haven't tried it or seen it, that is the main way Comet diverts from Chrome, is that you've got this AI assistant orchestration layer that sits on the side of a webpage that you can use to interact with the webpage and also just go off and do things. That interface suggests that you see the web as being less about actually browsing. I mean, you just said no one really has time to watch a YouTube video. Is the browsing part of the browser becoming less meaningful in the world of AI?
12:36 Speaker 05 I think people are still gonna watch YouTube videos for fun or exploration, but not when I'm actually like landing at a video like, I mean, you do a lot of intellectual stuff, so it's not, it's not always fun to watch the entire thing, but I, I like watching specific things in a video. And also, by the way, like when I'm in the middle of work, I can't be watching the Verge podcast, right? But I still don't want to wait till the entire weekend to fully watch it. I want to instantly know like what Zuckerberg might have said in your video about like their cluster or something. And then like, you know, in the weekend, I can go back and watch the entire thing. Like, you know, I may have a lot more time on my hands. So it's not actually gonna like stop the regular browsing. I actually think people are gonna like
13:21 Speaker 05 scroll through social platforms or like watch Netflix or YouTube even more, I would say, because they have more time on their hands. The AI is gonna do a lot of their work. It's just that they would, they would choose to spend it on entertainment more than like intellectual work. So intellectual browsing. Or if people derive entertainment from intellectual stuff, like intellectual entertainment, I think that's fine too. Like reading books, all these things are fine. Like reading blog posts that you otherwise wouldn't get time to read when you're in the middle of work. I think these are the kind of ways in which we want the browser to evolve, where people launch a bunch of comment assistant jobs, like, like tasks that would take like a few minutes to complete on the background and they're like chilling and like scrolling through X or, you know, whatever other social they like.
14:09 Speaker 04 We need to take a quick break. We'll be right back.
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15:39 Speaker 04 We're back with perplexity CEO, Aravind Srinivas.
15:44 Speaker 04 Your tagline for Comet is enabling people to, quote, browse at the speed of thought. I find that there's actually a very steep learning curve to understanding what it can do.
15:55 Speaker 05 By the way, Alex, I want to make, I want to make one point. There was some article either from words or somewhere else that Google was trying to use Gemini to predict maximal engagement time on a YouTube video and show the ad around that timestamp.
16:13 Speaker 05 Perplexity on the Comet browser, I mean, was using AI to exactly save your time to get you the exact timestamp you want in a fine-grained basis and not waste your time. You know, so often people will ask like, why would Google not do this and that? The incentives are completely different here.
16:32 Speaker 04 Yeah, and I want to get into that and have a lot of business model questions about Comet because it is also very compute intensive for you and expensive to run, which you've talked about. But to my point about the learning curve and making it approachable, how do you do that? Because when I first opened it, it's kind of like, I don't know what I can do with this thing. I mean, I go to your ex account and I see all the things you're sharing. But I do think there's going to be a learning curve that the people building these products don't necessarily appreciate.
17:02 Speaker 05 No, no, I appreciate that. And it's been the thing for me, myself as a user, is that like, even though it's fun to build all these agent use cases, it takes a while to stop doing things the usual way.
17:17 Speaker 05 And start using the AIs more, which includes even basic things like what reply you type onto an email thread. Even though Google has these automatic suggested replies, I don't actually usually like it. And it doesn't often pull context from outside Gmail to like, uh, help me do that. Or, or like Slack, checking on like unread Slack messages. I usually just go open Slack as a tab and try to like scroll through those, you know, fifty, a hundred channels I'm on, clicking each of those channels, like reading all the messages that are unread. It takes time to actually train myself to use Comet. So what we plan to do is actually publish a lot of the, um, early use cases on an educational material and have it be widely accessible. I think it's gonna go through the same trajectory that chatbots
18:02 Speaker 05 had. Like, I think the beginning when ChatGPT was launched, I'm sure like not a lot of people knew how to use it. What are all the ways in which you could take advantage of it? In fact, I still don't think people really, it's, it's not really a widespread thing. There, there are some people who really know how to use these AI tools very well. And most people have at least used it once or twice a week and they don't actually are like, they don't actually use it in their day to day workflows. The browser is gonna go through a similar trajectory. On the other hand, the one use case that's been very natural, very intuitive, that you don't even have to teach people how to use this as a sidecar. It, it's just picked up so much that, um, I feel like it'll be so intuitive. It'll almost be like, without the sidecar, why am I using the browser anymore? That, that's how it's gonna feel.
18:47 Speaker 04 It does quickly make the traditional chatbot perplexity ChatGPT interface feel a little arcane when you have the sidebar with the webpage.
18:56 Speaker 05 Exactly. A lot of people are using ChatGPT for, um, like you're on an email and you know, you wanna know how to respond. So you, you, you copy paste a bunch of context. You go there, you ask it to do something and then you copy paste it back. Uh, you edit it finally in, in your Gmail box, or you do it in your Google Sheets or Google Docs. All this is gonna, like, like the Comet is just gonna feel much more intuitive. You have it right there on the side and you can, you can do your edits, or you're using it to draft a tweet, or like. You know, Elon Musk posts something, you wanna like post a funny response to that. You can literally ask Comet, hey, like, draft me a funny reply tweet to that and it'll automatically have it ready for you. You literally have to click the post button.
19:38 Speaker 05 That, all that stuff is gonna definitely reduce the amount of times you literally open another tab and like, like, keep asking the AI. And firing up jobs right from your current website to go pull up relevant context for you. And then having it just like come back and push notify you when it's ready, that's, that's feeling like another level of delegation.
20:00 Speaker 04 Where is Comet struggling, based on the early data you've seen?
20:04 Speaker 05 Definitely not perfect yet for long horizon tasks. Like something that, that might take fifteen minutes or something like, uh, I'll give you some examples like go. I want a list of engineers who have studied at Stanford and also worked at Anthropic. And they don't have to be currently working at Anthropic, but they must have worked at Anthropic at least once. I want you to like, uh, give, uh, give me an exhaustive list of people like that. Port it over to Google Sheets with their LinkedIn URLs. And I want you to go to Zoom info and like try to get, get me their emails so that I can reach out to them. I also want you to bulk draft a personalized cold email to each of them to reach out to for a coffee chat. I don't think it can do this today.
20:48 Speaker 05 It can do parts of it. So you still have to be the orchestrator stitching to them, stitching them together. I'm pretty sure six months to a year from now, it can do the entire thing. I'm betting on progress in reasoning models to, to, to get us there. Just like how in twenty twenty-two, we bet on models like GPT-four and Claude three point five sonar to arrive. To make the hallucination problem perplexity basically non-existent when you have a good index and a good model. I'm betting on the fact that in the right environment of a browser. With access to all these tabs and tools. A sufficiently good reasoning model, like slightly better, maybe GPT-five, maybe like, um, Claude four point five, I don't know. Could, could, could get us right over the edge where all these things are like suddenly possible.
21:33 Speaker 05 And then like a recruiter's work worth one week is just like one prompt.
21:40 Speaker 05 Right sourcing and and and reach outs and then you got to do state tracking. Okay, it's not just about doing this one task, but you want it to keep following up, keep a track of their responses. If maybe some people respond, go and update the Google Sheets, mark the statuses like responded or like in progress and and like 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. Some of these things should be proactive. It doesn't even have to be a prompt. That's the extent to which we have an ambition to make the browser into like something that feels more like an OS where these are processes that are like running all the time.
22:24 Speaker 05 It's not going to be easy to do all this today, but in general, we have been successful at identifying the sweet spots where things that are currently on the edge of working and we nail those use cases, get the early adopters to love the product and then ride the wave of progress in reasoning models. That's that's been the strategy.
22:45 Speaker 04 And I'm not sure if it's just the reasoning models or it's just the products early or I haven't figured out how to use it correctly. My experience so far.
22:51 Speaker 05 It's not like I'm saying everything will work out of the box with a new model.
22:55 Speaker 04 Yeah.
22:55 Speaker 05 You you really have to know how to harness the capabilities and, you know, like have the right evals and like version control prompts and like do any post-training of auxiliary models, which which is basically our our expertise, like we are very good at these things.
23:11 Speaker 04 I would say that based on and I'll caveat that I haven't spent, you know, weeks yet with it, but based on my early experience with it, I would describe it as a little brittle or unpredictable in terms of the success rate. I asked it to book a very or take me to the booking page for a very specific flight that I wanted and it did it and it took me to the to the page where and it filled in some stuff whereas, you know, the normal perplexity or chat GPT interface would just take me to the webpage. It actually took me a little bit further. It didn't book it, but it took me further. But then I asked it like create a list of everyone who follows me on X that works at Meta and it gave me one person and I know for a fact there's many more than that. Or for example, Said find my last interview with the CEO of perplexity. And it said it couldn't, but then it showed a source link to the interview.
23:57 Speaker 04 So the the answer said it couldn't, but the source didn't. I see some brittleness in the product and I know it's early, but I'm just wondering like. Is is all of that just bugs or is that anything inherent in the models or the way you've architected it?
24:11 Speaker 05 But I can take a look at it if you you can share the link with me, but I would say.
24:18 Speaker 05 Majority of the advertised use cases that we we ourselves advertise are are things that are expected to work. Now, will it always like hundred percent of the time work in a deterministic way? No, are we going to get there in like a matter of months? I think so. You you kind of have to be timing yourself where you're not exactly waiting for the moment where everything works reliably. You want to be a little early, you want to be a little edgy. I think there are some people who would just love feeling the being part of the right to like, you know. There may be there are more majority of the users are going to wait until everything works stable. So that's why we think the sidecar is already a value add for those kind of people. Where, okay, they don't have to use the agents that much.
25:03 Speaker 05 They can use the sidecar, they can use Gmail, they can use calendar connectors. They can use like all this LinkedIn search features, YouTube. Or just basic stuff like searching over your own history. These are things that already work well, and this is already a massive value add over Chrome. And and one state like like several minutes worth long horizon tasks start working reliably. That's going to make it feel more than just a browser. That that's when you make it make it feel like an OS like you want everything in that one container. And you'll feel like the rest of the computer doesn't even matter.
25:35 Speaker 04 We started this conversation talking about how you think the browser gives you this context to be able to create an actually useful agent. And there's this other technical path that the industry is looking at and getting excited about, which is MCP, Model Context Protocol. And at a high level, it's just this orchestration layer that lets an LLM talk to Airtable, Google Docs, whatever. And do things on your behalf in the same way that Comet is doing. Doing that in the sidebar. You're going at this problem through the browser and through the logged in state of the browser that you talked about and that shortcut. While a lot of people, Anthropic and others, OpenAI, are looking at MCP as maybe the way that agents actually get built at scale. I'm curious what you think of those two paths and are you just very bearish on MCP?
26:20 Speaker 04 Or do you think MCP is for other kinds of companies?
26:25 Speaker 05 I'm not like extremely bearish on MCP. I just wanted to mature more. And I don't want to wait. I want to ship agents right now. I feel like AI as a community, as an industry, has just been talking about agents for like last two years and no one has actually shipped anything that worked.
26:43 Speaker 04 Yeah.
26:43 Speaker 05 And I got tired of that and like, uh, we felt like the browser is a great way to do that today. MCP is gonna definitely play a contributing factor to agents like in to the field like in the next five years. There's still a lot of security issues they need to figure out there. Having your, you know, authentication tokens communicated from your client to an MCP server or from remote MCP server to another client. All these things are pretty risky today, way more risky than just having your persistent logins on your client on the browser. Same issues exist with the operator, which try to create like server side versions of all your apps.
27:22 Speaker 04 This is OpenAI's computer use tool operator. Yeah.
27:25 Speaker 05 Exactly. I think there's gonna be some good MCP connectors that we'll definitely like integrate with like Linear or Notion. I guess GitHub has an MCP connector. So whenever it makes sense to use those over an agent that just opens these tabs and scrolls through them and clicks on things, we're gonna use that. But it's always gonna be bottlenecked by how well these servers are maintained and how you kind of like orchestrate these agents to use the protocol in the right way. It doesn't solve the search problem on those servers, by the way. You still have to like go and figure out like what data to retrieve.
28:05 Speaker 05 You defined it as the orchestration layer. It's not the orchestration layer. It's just a protocol for communicating between servers and the client. But or one server or another server. But it's still not solving the problem of like the reasoning and what, you know, knowing what what information to extract and knowing what actions to take and like all that chaining together different steps, trying things when things don't work. Whereas the browser is like, like basically something that's been designed for humans to actually operate in and extracting the DOM and knowing what actions to take are seems to be something that these models, the reasoning models seem to be pretty good at. So we're gonna do a hybrid approach and see what works best.
28:49 Speaker 05 At the end, it has to be fast, it has to be reliable and it has to be cheap. So if MCP lets us do that better than the browsing agent, then we'll do that, right? Like, there's no dogmatic vision here.
29:00 Speaker 04 At The Verge, we care a lot about the way our website looks and feels, the art of it, the visual experience. And with all this agent talk and it collapsing into browsers, I'm curious what you think happens to the web and to websites that devote a lot to making their sites actually interesting to browse. Does the web just become a series of databases that agents are crawling through MCP or whatever and this entire economy of the web goes away?
29:30 Speaker 05 No. I actually think like, if you have a brand, people are gonna be interested in knowing what that brand thinks. And it might go to you, the individual, or it might go to words, or it might go to both. Doesn't matter, right? So even within Verge, I might not be interested in articles written by some other people. I might be interested in specific people who have like, you know, like their content or something. So I think the brand will play an even bigger role in in a world where like both AIs and humans are surfing the web. And so I don't think it's gonna go away. Maybe the traffic for you might not even come organically, it might come through social media. Like, let's say you you publish a new article, some people might come click
30:15 Speaker 05 on it through Instagram or X or LinkedIn, doesn't matter, right? And whether it'll be possible for a new platform to build traffic from scratch by just doing the good old SEO tricks, I'm actually bearish on that.
30:31 Speaker 05 It's going to be difficult to create your own presence by just playing the old playbook. You got to build your brand through a different manner in this time period. And the existing ones who are lucky enough to already have a big brand presence, they have to maintain the brand also with a different playbook, not just doing a SEO or traditional like search engine growth tactics.
30:53 Speaker 04 We need to take another quick break. We'll be right back.
31:04 Speaker 01 Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great till the CFO sees them? That's bull spend and marketers are calling it out in Dashboard Confessions.
31:14 Speaker 02 I remember telling my boss, "It'll be good for the brand," when leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.
31:21 Speaker 01 Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.
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32:27 Speaker 04 On Comet as a business, it's very compute intensive and it's still invite only. I imagine you wish you could just throw the gates open and let anyone use it, but it would melt your servers or your AWS bills, right? So how do you scale this thing? Not only do you scale it from the product sense and it becoming a thing that normal people can easily use and understand that that curve of learning it that we talked about, but also just the business of it. You're not profitable, you're venture backed, you have to make money one day, you have to be profitable. How do you scale something like this that is actually even more compute intensive than a chatbot?
33:02 Speaker 05 I think if the reliability of these agents gets good enough, you could imagine people paying usage-based pricing. You might not be part of the max subscription tier of like $200 a month or anything, but there's like one task you really desperately want to get done. And you don't want to spend like three hours doing that. As long as the agent actually completes and you're like satisfied with the response rate, the success rate, you'll be okay with trusting the agent to like paying an advance fee of like $20. And for like, you know, for the recruiting task I described, like give me all the Stanford alumni who worked at Anthropic. I think that is a very interesting way of thinking about it, which is otherwise going to cost you a lot more time.
33:47 Speaker 05 Or you have to like hire like a sourcing consultant, or you have to hire a full-time sourcer whose only job is that. If you value your time, you're going to pay for it. And maybe like, let me give you another example. Like you want to put an ad on Meta, right? Instagram and you kind of want to like look at ads done by similar brands, pull that, study that, or like look at the adwords pricing of like, you know, 100 different keywords and figure out how to price your thing competitively. Like these are tasks that could definitely save you the hours and hours and maybe even give you an arbitrage over what you could do yourself. Because AI is able to do a lot more. At scale, if it helps you to make a few million bucks, does it not make sense to spend like $2,000 for that prompt? It does, right?
34:31 Speaker 05 I think we're going to be able to monetize in many more interesting ways than chatbots for the browser. It's still early, but it's the signs of life are already there in terms of what kind of use cases people have. And if you map reduce your like cognitive labor in bulk to an AI that goes and does it reliably, it almost becomes like your personal AWS cluster with natural language described task. And I think we have to execute on it. But if we do execute on it and the reasoning models are continuing to work well, you could imagine something that feels more like Claude Code for life. And Claude Code is a product that people are paying thousand bucks a month also because
35:16 Speaker 05 even though it's expensive, it helps you maybe get a promotion faster because you're getting more work done and your salary goes up and it feels like the ROI is there.
35:24 Speaker 04 Are you betting so much on the browser for the next, you know, chapter of perplexity because the traditional chatbot race has just been completely won by ChatGPT? Like, is perplexity as it exists today going away and the future of it is just comment?
35:40 Speaker 05 I wouldn't say that I'm betting on it because the ChatGPT, the chatbot race is over. Let me, let me decouple the two things. The chatbot race does, does seem like it's over in the sense that it's very unlikely that people think of another product for day-to-day chat. From the beginning, we never competed on that market. We were always competing on search. We were trying to reimagine search in the conversational style. Yes, every chatbot has search integrations. Some people like that, some people still like a more search-like interface that we have. So we're not gonna, we never wanted to go after that market and we're not competing there either. It's Google is trying to catch up and Grok's trying to catch up, Meta's trying to catch up.
36:24 Speaker 05 But I feel like all that is like wasted labor in my opinion at this point. The way I would phrase it is the browser is bigger than chat. It's a more sticky product and it's the only way to build agents. It's the only way to build end-to-end workflows. It's the only way to build a true personalization, memory and context. And so it's a bigger price, in my opinion, than trying to nail the chat game, especially in a market that's so fragmented. It's a much harder problem to crack to, both in terms of intelligence, how you package it, how you context engineer it, how you deal with all the shortcomings of the current moment, as well as like end-user facing UX,
37:07 Speaker 05 which could be the front end, the back end, the security, privacy, and all the other bugs that you get to deal with when working with a much more multifaceted product like the browser.
37:17 Speaker 04 Do you think that's why OpenAI is going to be releasing a browser? Because they agree with that?
37:24 Speaker 05 I don't know if they are. I read the same leaks that you have and it was very interesting. It came two hours after we launched. But I would say you also made another point about perplexity being ignored and Comet being the next thing. I don't see it that way because you cannot build a browser without a search. A lot of people praised the Comet browser because it doesn't feel like another browser. Because you know why? One of the main reasons is of course we have the sidecar and we have the agent and all that. But the search, default search is perplexity. And we made it in a way where even if you're having an intent to navigate it, it'll understand that. It'll give you like four or five links if it feels like it's a navigational query.
38:09 Speaker 05 It'll give you images pretty quickly. It'll give you like a very short answer also. So you can combine informational queries or navigational queries, agent queries in like one single search box. That is only doable if you actually are working on the search problem, which we've been working on since the last two and a half years, right? So I don't see it as two separate things. Basically, you cannot build a product like Chrome without building Google. Similarly, you cannot build a product like Comet without building perplexity.
38:37 Speaker 04 So is there a Comet standalone mobile app and a standalone perplexity app?
38:41 Speaker 05 Yeah, there will be standalone apps for both. Some people are going to use the standalone Comet app, just like how they use Chrome or Safari, and it's okay. They probably won't do that because it's going to have an AI that you can talk to on every web page, including in voice mode, actually. But. You still want to just navigate and get to a website quickly. Like, I just want to go and browse verge without actually having any question in my mind. That's fine. And I could go to perplexity and have the all the other things the app has like discover feeds and spaces and like just just a quick fast answers without the web interface. That's fine, too. And we're going to support like a packaged version of the browser Comet within the perplexity
39:25 Speaker 05 app, just like how the Google app still supports navigation like Chrome. So, by the way, both the Google app and the Chrome app are webkit apps on iOS. Similarly, both the Google app and the Chrome app are Chromium maps on Android. We'll have to follow the same trajectory.
39:42 Speaker 04 Speaking of competition, I'm curious what you think of Dia with the browser company has done. They released it around the same time as you. They're moving in this direction as well. Obviously, they're a smaller startup, but they got a lot of buzz with Arc, their original browser, and now seem to be betting on the same idea that you have with Comet. I'm curious if you've gotten to try it or how you think it will stack up against Comet.
40:05 Speaker 05 I haven't tried it myself. I've seen what other people have said. I think they have some interesting ideas on like the visuals and the front end. If I were them, I would have just tried it in the same browser they had instead of going and trying to build distribution on a new one. But yeah, it's interesting. Like, we are definitely going to study every product out there. And our focus, though, more goes on to Chrome. It is the big brother. And the way I think about it is even if I take 1% of the Chrome users set their default as Comet, that's a massive, massive win for us and a massive loss for them, too, by the way, because any ad revenue lost is massive, like at that scale.
40:48 Speaker 04 Is word of mouth the main way you're going to grow Comet? Or are you looking for distribution partnerships beyond that?
40:54 Speaker 05 In the beginning, we're gonna do more word of mock growth. It's very powerful. It's worked out well for us in the past with perplexity itself. And we're gonna try to follow the same trajectory here. And luckily, we have an installed base of perplexity already of like, you know, 30 to 40 million people. So even if we get a good chunk of those people to try out Comet and convert some of those people who tried it into setting it as default, it'll already be a massive victory without relying on any distribution partnerships. And then we're obviously gonna like try seeing like how to convert that progress into like, you know, a partnership like Google has with a bunch of people. I just wanna like caveat by saying it's gonna be extremely hard. We've spoken about this in the past where Google makes sure every Android phone
41:39 Speaker 05 has Google Chrome as the default browser. And you cannot change that. You lose a lot of money if you change that. Microsoft makes sure every Windows laptop is coming with Edge as the default browser. Again, you cannot change that. You will lose a lot of money if you change that. Now, the next step is, okay, let them be the default browser. At least can you have your app as part of the Android or Windows build? You still cannot change that easily, especially on Windows. It's basically pretty impossible to convince like large OEMs to change that. So they have all these agreements that are like several years locked in. And you work with companies that plan for like the device that they're shipping two years in advance. That's their mode in some sense.
42:24 Speaker 05 It's not even the product. It's it's not even exactly in the distribution world. It's more in these legalities of how they crafted these agreements, which is why I'm like, like, you know, happy that the DOJ is at least looking into Google. And we've made a list of recommendations on that, and I hope something happens there.
42:42 Speaker 04 Yeah, they may have forced a spin off of Chrome, which would be really interesting and reset things. You know, there's a lot of people that think Apple should buy you. And Eddie Q, one of their top execs, actually had some pretty nice things to say about you on the stand when he was there during the Google trial and said that you guys had talked about working together. Obviously, you can't talk about something that hasn't been announced yet, especially with Apple. But what do you make of that and Apple?
43:06 Speaker 05 I mean, I'm firstly honored by Eddie mentioning us in the trial as a product that he likes. And he's heard from his circles that people like it. I would love for to work with Apple on integrations with Safari or Siri or Apple Intelligence. It's the one product that almost everybody loves using, or it's a status symbol. Like, everybody wants to graduate using an Apple device. So I'm pretty sure that we share a lot of design aesthetics in terms of how we do things and how they do things. At the same time, my goal is to make Perplexity as big as possible. It's definitely possible that this browser is so platform agnostic that it can benefit
43:48 Speaker 05 Android and iOS ecosystems, Windows and Mac ecosystems. And we can be pretty big on our own, just like Google was. Of course, Google owns Android, but you could imagine they would have been pretty successful if they just had the best search engine and the best browser and they didn't actually own the platform either.
44:07 Speaker 04 I and others also reported that Mark Zuckerberg approached you about potentially joining Meta and working on his reboot of their AI efforts. What was Zuck's pitch? I'm curious. Tell me.
44:19 Speaker 05 Zuck is awesome. He's doing a lot of awesome things. And I think Meta has such a sticky product. It's fantastic. And we look at that as an example of it's possible to build a large business without having any platform yourself.
44:33 Speaker 04 Were you shocked by the numbers that Zuck is paying for top AI research? These nine-figure compensation offers? I think a lot of them are actually tied to Meta's stock needing to increase for those numbers to be paid. So it's actually pretty contingent on the business and not just guaranteed payouts. But still, huge numbers.
44:54 Speaker 05 Yeah, huge.
44:57 Speaker 05 Definitely, I was surprised by the magnitude of the numbers. Seems like it's needed at this point for them. But at the same time, like Elon and XAI were shown, like, you know, you don't need to spend that much to train models competitive with OpenAI and Anthropic. So I don't know if money alone solves every problem here. You do need to have a team that works well together, has a proper mission alignment and milestones. In some sense, failure is not an option for them. The amount of investment is so big and I feel like the way Zach probably thinks is, you know, I'm gonna get all the people, I'm gonna get all the compute and I'm gonna get all the like, like, you know, milestones set up for you guys, but now it's all on you to execute.
45:42 Speaker 05 And if you fail, like, it's gonna look pretty bad on me, so you better not fail. That's probably the the deal.
45:48 Speaker 04 What are the second order effects to the AI talent market, you think, after this, after Zach's hiring spree?
45:56 Speaker 05 I mean, it's definitely gonna feel like a transfer market now, right? Like with NBA or something.
46:01 Speaker 04 Yeah.
46:02 Speaker 05 There's gonna be a few individual stars who are like having so much leverage. One thing I've noticed is Anthropic researchers are not the ones getting poached.
46:11 Speaker 04 Mostly. They have, he has poached some, but not, not, not as many.
46:15 Speaker 05 Yeah, so it does feel like that's something labs need to work on, which is truly like aligning people on one mission, that like money alone is not the motivator for them. And as a company, your company is doing well, like, you know, the stock is going up and you feel dopamine from working there every day and it's, you're encountering new kind of challenges, you feel a lot of growth, you're learning new things, and you're getting richer too along the way, like, why would you wanna go and just because you have some guaranteed payments?
46:46 Speaker 04 Do you think strongly about getting perplexity to profitability to be able to control your own destiny, so to speak?
46:53 Speaker 05 Definitely, it's inevitable. We want to do it before the IPO. And we think we can IPO in 2028 or '29. I would like to IPO, by the way, just to be clear. I don't want to stay private forever like some of the companies have chosen to do so. Even though it gives you advantages in M and As and like decision-making power, I do think the publicity and the marketing you get from an IPO and the fact that people can finally invest in a search alternative to Google is a pretty massive opportunity for us to IPO. But I don't think it makes sense to IPO before hitting like a billion dollars in revenue and some profitability along the way. So that's definitely something we want to get to in the next four years or three years.
47:35 Speaker 05 But I don't want to stunt our own growth and not be aggressive in trying new things today.
47:42 Speaker 04 Makes sense. You launched Perplexity. It's crazy that it's already been just over three years now, and it was right around when ChatGPT first launched. And it's wild to think about everything we've talked about and that all this has happened in like barely three years. So maybe this is an impossible question, but I want to leave you with this question. If you look out three years from now, you just talked about the IPO, which is interesting, but what does Perplexity look like three years from now?
48:10 Speaker 05 I hope it becomes the one tool you think of when you want to actually get anything done. And it has like a lot of like deep connection to you because it synchronizes with all your context and proactively thinks on your behalf and truly makes your life a lot easier.
48:31 Speaker 04 All right, we'll leave it there. Aravind, thanks.
48:33 Speaker 05 Thank you.
48:37 Speaker 04 Thanks to Aravind for taking the time to speak with me and thank you for tuning in. If you'd like to let us know what you thought about this episode or what else you'd like us to cover, drop us a line. You can email us at [email protected] . We're also on TikTok and Instagram via at DecoderPod. If you like Decoder, please share it with your friends and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you haven't already, don't forget to subscribe to The Verge, which gets you access to my newsletter, command line, and a bunch of other great stuff. Decoder is a production of The Verge and is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our producers are Kate Cox and Nick Stat. Our editor is Ursa Wright. The Decoder music is by Breakmaster Cylinder. See you next time.
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