Founder and CEO of Perplexity AI Aravind Srinivas, who had briefly changed his name to Aravind ‘Bhai’, following a friendly banter with Carl Pei, the co-founder and CEO of Nothing, has been on a social media engagement spree. This was noticed ever since the company raised over $70 million this January, from investors, including big tech giants such as NVIDIA, Jeff Bezos, and others. 

Leaping Ahead of OpenAI

A relatively new entrant, Perplexity AI has been working its way through user adoption. After publicly launching in 2023, Perplexity has over 10 million monthly active users with over 1 million users from India alone. 

While ChatGPT reached 1 million users within a week of its launch, and now has around 180.5 million users, it is not fair to compare both the platforms, considering OpenAI had a first-mover advantage. 

Way Through Collab

The AI-powered answer engine that is going against some of the biggest tech players, especially Google, and has been making strides in collaborations with strategic partners. 

Recently, Srinivas confirmed that Perplexity will partner with Sarvam AI and similar other startups that are building large language models suited for India’s linguistic background. He believes that such partnerships will mutually benefit both parties, with Perplexity AI utilising the startup model and, in return, providing a large user base to them.

Last week, Srinivas announced a partnership with Slack, the communication and messaging platform for organisations. Through ‘Perplexity Push’ bot, Slack users will be able to get real-time updates, summaries and sources in their workspace. 

Perplexity has also been building strategic partnerships with hardware providers. Last month, Perplexity announced its pplx-online LLM APIs to power Rabbit R1, an AI-powered gadget that uses a large action model (LAM). 

Source : X 

Interestingly, with the ongoing tweet exchanges between Srinivas and Pei, a possible partnership between the AI engine and the phonemaker looks likely.  

Search by Default 

While Google is busy with its latest most-powerful AI model Gemini Pro 1.5, and renaming its AI chatbot, they also seem to care less about Perplexity. “We are the only ones doing it in a way where users not only look at AI summaries but also care about the richness and diversity on the web,” said Google chief Sundar Pichai. However, that hasn’t deterred Perplexity from following its goal. The company is going about convincing service providers to make it as their default search option. 

Last month, Arc Browser, a web browser developed by The Browser Company, announced that Perplexity can be set as the default search engine on its browser. 

Source: X

Cami.ai, an AI assistant that can provide answers, images and transcribe audio, announced that they would be using Perplexity AI for providing all up-to-date information. Perplexity is also supporting browsing for Superagents AI, a platform for running AI agents with an API.  

Superior Brand Packaging Through X

Apart from Srinivas being active on X giving his two cents on new announcements, including Gemini Pro 1.5, he has also been sharing various outputs of Perplexity AI that surpassed Google. By pushing such content, Srinivas is packaging Perplexity as a better AI tool than its competitors. He also did not miss the chance to take a dig at Google’s chatbot without taking names and chimed into the OpenAI Sora debate as well. 

Source: X

When Andrej Karpathy left OpenAI, Srinivas was quick to post about Perplexity’s Push Notifications feature, which will aid one to be updated with the latest news. Similarly, he even spoke about the superior quality of curated news on Perplexity, which he claims “is better than X on some days”.

Ironically, Perplexity, which cannot generate images at the moment, still has a long way to go in order to catch up with Elon Musk’s X platform. In a recent interview, Musk has confirmed that he is in serious talks with Midjourney. The partnership will possibly bring the text-to-image generation tool to X’s AI platform Grok. 

Srinivas also spoke about the possibility of X using all the videos of the platform to build something similar to Sora, a feature that is also not available on Perplexity AI. While Perplexity may lack some of the advanced features found on other major tech platforms, such as ChatGPT, Copilot, or Gemini, its demonstrated growth and marketing strategies position it as a promising contender in the AI-engine arena.