In an attempt to challenge Google, Perplexity has harnessed the power of generative AI–with its problematic tendencies — in order to become the dominant way that people find information on the internet.
AI search tool became popular in 2024. The service was hailed as a promising alternative to Googling. The service, like other AI players, has been scrutinized. Suing for alleged copyright violation Forbes has accused it of plagiarizing news articles, closely paraphrasing websites, and hallucinating inaccurate information.
Perplexity today claims that despite the furor its service receives 650 million requests per month and is reliable. The company issaid to be in pursuit of investment that would value it at $18 billion. The company is working on its AI assistants and pushing them for mobile devices. Own web browserMotorola announced in April that Perplexity will be bundled with their new Razr Ultra smartphones. Last month, the company partnered up with PayPal to make buying products easier. Samsung is also Bloomberg reported that the company was in talks about including Perplexityon its devices. (Perplexity declined comment after the interview.).
Perplexity’s CEO Aravind Srinivas talked with Will Knight, senior editor at WIRED, via phone and email. This conversation has been edited to ensure clarity and conciseness.
Wired: It seems that the PayPal deal is important to everyone’s vision of agents. Is ecommerce a killer “agenttic” app?
Aravind Srinivas : The killer app is agents. Agents let users have the experience they want. Some people enjoy shopping and research, while others want it done for themselves. There is a spectrum, and we focus on what’s best for the user.
Speaking about the experience, agents make mistakes. What happens if they accidentally buy something?
Since ancient times, merchants and buyers have adapted themselves to new technologies. We show them both what’s possible and let them make the decision. Security and error-resolution have always been a priority for every successful technology, and this will not change.
Integrating AI into personal devices is a major theme. Why is the Motorola deal important to you?
This is a big deal, because Motorola is the largest phone brand in the world. This partnership allows us to make AI more accessible and trustworthy than ever. Perplexity will be introduced to millions of people in a native, seamless way. This will allow more people to discover how much more is possible with search.
Wouldn’t you like to develop your own devices? We are focused on building a superior AI assistant and answer engine.
Motorola is going to offer other AI assistants. How will Perplexity differentiate itself?
As AI Assistants become more commonplace, accuracy and trust become even more crucial. Unreliable assistants aren’t very helpful. If an assistant is sycophantic or misleading, it’s not an assistant. It’s a manipulator. This is not only useless, but dangerous. Inaccurate AI can have a negative compounding impact. We’ve always been at the forefront of developing AI and AI assistants that are focused on accuracy and verifyability. This will have a positive effect.
Hold on… Perplexity, like other AI search engines, has been criticized for hallucinating or getting things wrong.
This criticism is very helpful to us, as it allows us to improve. In reality, errors only account for a tiny fraction of the results. Our answers are more accurate than 10 links that have been contaminated by years of SEO-optimized material. [In response to a follow-up request, Perplexity did not provide further details on error rates, but Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman, said that reliability is improving constantly]. We are focusing on accuracy and trust as AI becomes more integrated into our lives. We can’t make progress without your feedback.
The “discover” section of Perplexity also steals copyrighted news articles. Do you know why some publishers are upset about this?
This is a question we’ve answered before. See our Blog post about how we respect robots.txt. [a file added to websites that specifies whether web crawlers should access their content]
Perplexity for Android and iOS appears “agentic” because it can perform actions. What is the significance of this change?
AI can answer questions pretty well now. What is really needed is to get AI to act. You can call it “agents”, “assistants” or whatever you like, but the goal is to get AI to execute actions. We’re [also building a] a browser, and an Assistant on iOS, Android.
Is Apple and Google too tightly controlling their mobile platforms in comparison to outsiders who want to build agents?
It’s especially difficult with iOS, as you have to connect a lot of event APIs. Mail, Calendars, Reminders and Podcasts are all natively available on iOS through the Apple SDK (19459056). You can therefore draft emails, schedule appointments, move meetings, create reminders, and open podcasts. You can search for podcasts. “Get me the one where Mark Andreessen talks about de-banking with Joe Rogan.”
The main reason it’s difficult is that you can’t access other apps. iOS is similar to Android in that AI cannot access many apps on Android (meaning the Perplexity Assistant can interact with some apps easier than others). Third-party apps are able to build their SDKs so that they can be accessed on the Android SDK. Our Android system, for example, can display a Spotify song. On iOS, Spotify is only available as a link, and the audio must be manually played.
Ah, so app developers are the ones holding AI agents back then?
This is the challenge. If people offer us APIs, such as Open Table, Uber or DoorDash–where we could access information within an app without having to even open the app–that would be great. This is a powerful tool. If we find out that Uber comfort costs less than 5 or 10% of Uber X and we have access to information on Uber, we can book Uber comfort – if that is a preference you’ve set on Perplexity.
Find the best Thai restaurant near you [we can] and get me a Dash [delivery] much faster than going to DoorDash, searching for Thai Food, scrolling through options, reading reviews, and then putting in your address, doing the check-out, all that stuff. We could do all of that in our system, and make the experience much more seamless and simple. I think this is the direction things are going, but people will have to open their apps up to us and we’ll see who’s willing.
Could it be that AI agents aren’t as smart and useful as they could be?
According to my analogy [for AI agents] we are now at the same point as Perplexity [just before it took off]was in 2022. It’s not as if we had all the answers, and people laughed at hallucinations. Some people called it “Google in micro seconds”. It wasn’t quite there.
The model improved many months after it was released, and I expect that the same will happen with the assistants and agents. There will be a set of things which are really useful, such as daily use cases. And there will be a long list of things which don’t work and we’ll keep fixing them over time.
But this is exactly why we’re building a [web] web browser. The browser front end allows you to do the work yourself if you aren’t happy with the AI’s results. We can then learn from this and improve it over time. Waymo and Tesla’s self-driving cars did not work well for a long period of time. People now take them for granted. I think we are on a similar path.
Was this the reason you floated Perxplexity’s idea of taking control of Chrome – if Google was forced to divest?
No, we don’t say that we’re interested. We’re saying if there is no other way, if Google has to divest Chrome then we would be open to running the project. Google shouldn’t have to divest Chrome because Chrome and Chromium work together.
Chromium, an open-source project run by Google [well] is the reason behind Microsoft Edge and Brave. OpenAI has shown interest in gaining control of Chrome.
It would be a disaster to give ownership of Chrome or Chromium, as OpenAI and open source are an oxymoron. [OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The company says it will release an open source AI model this summer.]
Only two companies can run Chrome in the real world: Microsoft and Meta. Microsoft would ruin it, just as it did with Edge. Transferring Chrome to Meta would be like transferring Chrome from a monopoly to another.[TheFTCfiledalawsuit(19459040]accusing Meta of acting as social networking monopoly. The company argues that this is not true.]
For what do you think agents will be most useful? I think [they will make] will make a big difference in your personal searches.
For example, you can ask “What was the article that I read last week on this particular company?” Or “Can you summarize my X-feed for me so I know what’s currently trending?” Because you don’t need to be distracted by X. You can ask someone to schedule a meeting with me and, if the time is not convenient, send them an email.
