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Perplexity AI
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This guy hated Google, so he built his own $20 billion app! Aravind Srinivas grows up in India obsessed with computers, earns a PhD at Berkeley, and spends years at OpenAI. In 2022 his first company dies in weeks when Twitter shuts down its free API, so he starts over. When his first employee asks about health insurance, Aravind has no idea what a deductible is. He Googles it and gets nothing but ads, so they wire up a chatbot to answer HR questions, and it responds with complete confidence and it's completely wrong. Which clicks. Srinivas and co-founder Dennis, Denis Yarats, are both PhDs and in academia. Every claim needs a source or it's just an opinion. So they rebuild the chatbot to pull every answer from the real web and cite every sentence instead of giving you hundreds of links like Google. Perplexity reads those pages and writes a single direct answer. Researchers love it. Then students start using it. Then professionals replace Google with Perplexity for everyday searches. And while Google and OpenAI burn billions building their own models, Perplexity runs on top of them, switching to whichever performs best. Today Perplexity has 100 million users and is worth $20.0B.