Aravind Srinivas is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an artificial intelligence based search engine.
About Aravind Srinivas and his background:
- He grew up in India and studied computer science at Stanford University, earning his bachelor’s, master’s and PhD degrees there.
- During his PhD at Stanford, he worked on machine learning and artificial intelligence under the guidance of professors like Daphne Koller.
- Prior to founding Perplexity in 2022, he worked at OpenAI as a research scientist from 2018-2021.
- At OpenAI, he made contributions to large language model research, including helping develop models like GPT-3.
- His technical research has focused on areas like unsupervised learning, multi-task learning, meta-learning, and AI safety/ethics.
- He co-founded Perplexity with the goal of developing advanced AI systems in an ethical and safety-conscious manner, with a long-term vision of beneficial artificial general intelligence (AGI).
- Under Srinivas’ leadership, Perplexity has grown to over 200 employees and raised over $200 million in funding from investors.
He’s very much active on X and according to his tweets, here are some of his areas of interest:
- AI Safety and Ethics: As the CEO of a company focused on developing advanced AI responsibly, AI safety and ethics were undoubtedly a core area of focus. This includes technical work on making AI systems more reliable, robust, and aligned with human values.
- Constitutional AI: Anthropic has been a leading proponent of the “constitutional AI” approach, which aims to bake in the right rules, principles and incentives into AI systems from the ground up.
Perplexity raised $100M in its last funding round and is now valued at $520M.
