Who is Aravind Srinivas? A Tamil-Born IIT Madras Graduate Leading Perplexity AI

The CEO of the AI firm Perplexity, Aravind Srinivas, made headlines following his agreement with Bharati Airtel to give Airtel customers free access to Perplexity. The Indian computer scientist has been the subject of media attention ever since the deal began.

Who is Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity?

Tamil Nadu's Chennai is the birthplace of Aravind Srinivas. He attended IIT Madras, one of the best Indian universities, for his undergraduate and graduate studies. Later, at the University of California, Berkeley, he worked for a PhD in computer science.

Srinivas worked on machine learning and artificial intelligence research at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind during his academic career. He co-founded Perplexity AI in 2022 with Andy Konwinski, Johnny Ho, and Dennis Yarats. In order to differentiate itself from conventional search engines, PerplexityAI created an AI-powered "answer engine" that was intended to offer concise and referenced answers to user enquiries.

Perplexity has obtained substantial funds and investments from prominent businesspeople under Srinivas' direction. Time magazine named Srinivas one of the "TIME100 Most Influential People in AI" in 2024. Srinivas expressed his happiness, saying he had been waiting for a US green card for almost three years.

Srinivas is currently trending on social media following a partnership with Airtel, one of India's biggest telecom networks. During a recent meeting with students, Srinivas cautioned them that major Internet companies like Google, Meta, and OpenAI are always searching for new sources of income that are both promising and easily replicable. "If your company is something that can make revenue on the scale of hundreds of millions of dollars or potentially billions of dollars, you should always assume that a model company will copy it," Srinivas stated.