Smarter searches

Imagine an AI chatbot that operates like a virtual Ph.D. student, citing sources for all the information that it provides. That’s what Aravind Srinivas (Ph.D.’21 CS) is trying to do through his AI-driven search company, Perplexity, which he co-founded in 2022, along with Andrew Konwinski (M.S.’09, Ph.D.’12 CS), among others, shortly after completing his doctoral studies at UC Berkeley.

“Ph.D. students write papers, and for every sentence they write, they reference another paper. That way, the paper is [based on] scientific facts,” said Srinivas. “We baked that principle into an AI chatbot, and that ended up becoming Perplexity.”

AI technologies can sometimes hallucinate and make up answers. Srinivas aimed to reduce this problem by building a search engine that would only provide results that it could cite or reference.

“From the beginning, Perplexity has been this marriage of Wikipedia and ChatGPT having a baby together. Except the data for that marriage is coming from the entire internet, not just Wikipedia,” said Srinivas. “You can still converse and chat like in ChatGPT, but the response would be like a Wikipedia article, with subsections, citations and sources. It’s like ChatGPT’s educated uncle.”

Studying at Berkeley, Srinivas appreciated that Ph.D. students were expected to drive every step in the research and development process, from conceiving the idea to running the initial experiments and performing all the engineering.

“I learned that software engineering is critical to doing great work in AI,” said Srinivas. “It’s not just about mathematical equations on a whiteboard, but rather making them work in practice. So you need to be a good engineer.”

Srinivas realized that launching a startup wouldn’t be easy. After completing his Ph.D., he worked for a year at OpenAI, then crystallized his idea for Perplexity, reached out to investors and went to work building his team.

To Pieter Abbeel, professor of electrical engineering and computer sciences, Srinivas’s talent and drive were evident early on. “When it came to research, Aravind was the kind of student who not only brought great execution, but who was also capable of bringing great vision,” he said.

Srinivas’s advice to other Berkeley engineers who want to make the leap from researcher to entrepreneur is simple: “Remember that a true vision, a true obsession about something, can be seen by other people, too, and that is what’s going to help you recruit people and attract funding,” he said. “But the most important part — and the hardest — is to persist through the phase where you’re not sure. Never give up, just keep at it.”

Learn more: Berkeley alum wants to ‘make the planet smarter’