Person attributes
Aravind Srinivas is an Indian-American computer scientist, researcher, programmer, one of the founders of Perplexity AI, and an angel investor. Srinivas's research has included contributions to the field of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) following earning his PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Aravind Srinivas's research work has included contributions in AI and machine learning algorithms, specifically solving complex business challenges, and this has led to him earning accolades and recognition for that work at conferences and in industry events. This work also occurred when he worked as a research intern at OpenAI, DeepMind, and Google, where he worked respectively from 2018 to 2021. In 2021, he worked as a research scientist at OpenAI before cofounding Perplexity AI.
In an interview, Aravind Srinivas spoke of his drive to learn and his interest in deep learning research and entrepreneurship. These led him to his internship in DeepMind, a period during which he also read about Larry Page, the founding of Google, and the evolution of PageRank. This led Srinivas to an internship with the inventor of transformers, Ashish Vaswani, where Srinivas and Vaswani worked on developing deep learning models for vision and making transformers more universal for computation. This history drew Srinivas to the problem of search and the challenge of building a product that gives users fast, accurate, and truthful answers to questions. This led to the cofounding of Perplexity AI, which seeks to solve this problem.
In 2022, Aaravind Srinivas cofounded and took on the role of chief executive officer (CEO) at Perplexity AI, a company working to build a trusted information service. Perplexity works as a search engine that uses advanced artificial intelligence technologies to provide direct answers to user queries and has the ability to discover AI use cases and challenge other systems, such as ChatGPT and Google Search, with its conversational search engine. The conversational search engine allows users to ask questions and receive answers supported by online citations, with the citations intended to guide users to trust the answers and give them additional reading for questions that are complex or challenging.
Since early 2023, Srinivas has also worked as an angel investor. Given his interest in artificial intelligence, it is perhaps no surprise that his early angel investments have been focused on companies developing AI capabilities or approaching those capabilities in new ways. Those investments have included ElevenLabs, which works on text-to-speech and voice cloning software; Pika, which is developing a text-to-video platform; Suno, which is developing a text-to-music platform; Julius, which is developing an artificially intelligent data scientist for the analysis of various data sources; and Extropic, which is developing novel hardware for generative AI computation.
