Aravind Srinivas, born in 1994, is perhaps today the most interesting personality of the new wave of entrepreneurs in the artificial intelligence chain. Its history unfolds between two crucial worlds of technology: India and the United States.
Born in Chennai (Madras), India, where his parents still live, Srinivas has grown in an environment marked by the search for knowledge and intellectual curiosity. He was his family’s first engineer. Since childhood, in addition to being brilliant in studies, he was interested in data and statistics, also in following national sport: the cricket. His relatives, for his scientific inclinations, were convinced that he would end up in a prestigious university such as Madras’ Indian Institute of Technology. Just there graduation and master in electronic engineering follows. Then, like many young Indian researchers, he decides to make the big leap to the United States. In fact, studies with a PhD in computer science at the University of Berkeley continues. He completed his training in the second part of the 10s, in which artificial intelligence crosses a new entrepreneurial liveliness. Srinivas carries out research internships at important companies and workshops, including Openai, Deepmind and Google.
A crucial moment in his academic and professional experience is the summer experience at Openai in 2018. As he said frankly, in that context he feels less prepared than other researchers, and so he studies even more, independently, to learn new techniques. The figure that influences him most in that period is Ilya Sutskever, the historic Chief Scientist of Openai. Sutskever often questioned the beliefs of the young Indian researcher and convinces him to apply simpler techniques and to aim for the essentials, without frills.
Srinivas decides not to continue his academic career but to found a new company, to seize the window of opportunities for the explosion of attention on artificial intelligence. In 2022 Perplexity was born, which has co-founders Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho. Initially, the business idea was focused on the use of artificial intelligence to answer questions about some data sets, such as the salary archive of a company’s employees. Perplexity then evolves in a short time as a research engine of conversations based on artificial intelligence, through sources mentioned in detail and able to stimulate that intellectual curiosity to which Srinivas gives a lot of importance, in its vision of the world and technology. In a relatively short time, Perplexity reaches hundreds of millions of monthly research and attracts investments, among others, by Jeff Bezos and Nvidia. The evaluation ranges between 9 and 14 billion, while a new investment round is underway. Srinivas does not consider perplexity in direct competition with Google for the simple searches of one or two words that lead to the sites, but rather in quickly solving information problems that Google does not manage well, as the answer to complex questions by summarizing and reforming information and citing the sources. The real future differentiation, according to Srinivas, will reside in making artificial intelligences more agent, capable not only of answering questions, but also of performing more and more actions for the user, how to book a restaurant, manage the agenda and accounting. Perplexity certainly does not have the trafficking of chatgpt and is for now far from the impersonire Google, but it is still an integral part of an increasingly lively ecosystem of artificial intelligence and receives the constant praise as well as the investments of Jensen Huang of Nvidia, which never forgets to mention Perplexity and Srinivas in its conferences-shows.
Certainly, the story of this young Chennai entrepreneur is important not only for its product but also because it mobilizes the attention of a huge community of Indian researchers and developers, for which it is a model. In the academic year 2023/2024 there were about 330 thousand Indian students in the United States. The frequent conferences of Srinivas, in US universities as in India, attract growing attention and are part of a very lively public debate. Srinivas makes regular travel to India to meet the academic, entrepreneurial and political community of the subcontinent.
Srinivas firmly believes that India should play a significant role in the era of artificial intelligence, training their models not only for Indian languages but to compete on a global scale and inspire future generations of engineers. India has a huge human capital potential, the only one in the world capable of competing with Chinese skills, but is behind infrastructure, energy and hardware chain, even if Prime Minister Modi has started programs and investments on semiconductor and electronic assembly.
For young Indian entrepreneurs, Srinivas suggests a gradual path: to start with an interesting product to obtain users and funding, then move on to open source models, and following other solutions with more capital intensity. The CEO of Perplexity is a supporter of the Open Source, to prevent monopolies and oligopoli, and to ensure access to technologies. In his frequent meetings in Indian technological ecosystems, he invited the scientific and entrepreneurial community to concentrate on distillation techniques, hoping that the next Deepseek can come from India. At the same time, it does not deny the challenges that Indian programmers and developers, as well as companies based on outsourcing, will have to face to adapt to the era of artificial intelligence.
Finally, Srinivas often repeats that his parents are still more proud of his doctorate than by the creation of a billion -evaluated company. It is not just an element of color and should not be underestimated, because it brings back to a model of attention for the study, and for university titles, which is central to all the cultures of ado-patient.
Figures like Srinivas have passed the myth of the entrepreneur who abandoned his studies to create his products in the garage: according to the model of Asian entrepreneurship, first graduation, master and preferably doctoral, and then you can dedicate yourself full -time to companies, in the garage or in the office. Millions and millions of Indians, in the coming years, will continue to study and create, also following the example of Aravind Srinivas.