Speaker 1: Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.
Speaker 2: It's not just chip makers pitching the furniture of computing.
Speaker 2: At computex Perplexity took the stage with Intel to unveil
Speaker 2: what it calls the world's first hybrid local server AGENTIC
Speaker 2: inference orchestrator, a phrase that sounds like it was generated
Speaker 2: by AI itself. Here with more Perplexity, CEO arab In
Speaker 2: shrinaves Aravin is great to have you back on the show.
Speaker 2: I spent all morning thinking about how do I explain this,
Speaker 2: and basically, the orchestrator is there. It's a piece of
Speaker 2: software to decide whether a or a part of an
Speaker 2: AI workload is best done locally on device at the edge,
Speaker 2: or if it needs the superior computing of cloud server.
Speaker 2: Is that right? Have I kind of nailed what you're
Speaker 2: what you're trying to solve for here?
Speaker 3: That's correct? So yeah, thank you for having me again.
Speaker 3: And that is exactly correct. You don't want all your
Speaker 3: compute centralized in gigantic servers and everything running through the
Speaker 3: largest frontier models. You're already reading reports of how people
Speaker 3: are freaking out about their token costs. Some people are
Speaker 3: spending half a billion dollars per month per engineer. What
Speaker 3: you actually want is efficient token value per WoT per user,
Speaker 3: and that requires orchestrating privacy, accuracy, intelligence and costs all
Speaker 3: together in one single unified system. And that orchestration capability
Speaker 3: requires hybrid model between server side and the local and
Speaker 3: that's what we demoed today with Intel. And we are
Speaker 3: actually chip agnostic, So our solution works with Intel, it
Speaker 3: works with NVIDRTX. So just like how we've been model agnostic,
Speaker 3: we've planned to be chip agnostic here.
Speaker 2: That's interesting. So my next question was going to be
Speaker 2: why Intel? You know, what is it about Intel's role
Speaker 2: in the AIPC market and on the service side that
Speaker 2: makes it work. But if you're agnostic, what's the breakthrough
Speaker 2: that you've cracked, Like, if you've written the software, what
Speaker 2: is it you've managed to achieve in how those streatloads
Speaker 2: are diverted? Okay, go go a bit further.
Speaker 3: So, like I said, you want one single system to
Speaker 3: route across models, files, tools, chips, servers and decide when
Speaker 3: to use which model or when to use your local
Speaker 3: file system, your local subasion model, your local LM, or
Speaker 3: when to use a frontier model for depending on the
Speaker 3: task and the prompt or depending on the confidentiality and
Speaker 3: sensitivity if your files are apps that requires you to
Speaker 3: make clever orchestration decisions, balance trade offs between accuracy and costs.
Speaker 3: And that's what we're doing in our software and that
Speaker 3: computer essentially an operating system and balances all these different
Speaker 3: objectives simultaneously.
Speaker 1: I mean sit in such an interesting place as an orchestrator,
Speaker 1: whether it be letting people use your own house models,
Speaker 1: whether it's using a mix of third party models, and
Speaker 1: the third party models are up to or not right now,
Speaker 1: I don't hen I just want to get your take
Speaker 1: on how you feel about competitive modes or competitive threats
Speaker 1: if these big companies Anthropic, Open AI, SpaceX ll go
Speaker 1: public in the next few months.
Speaker 3: We actually love Andthropic, Open AI, XAI, all these frontier labs.
Speaker 3: Every time any of their AI gets better, our unified
Speaker 3: system also gets better because we route across all of them.
Speaker 3: We basically think of Perplexity computer as taking the best
Speaker 3: of all AI and putting it together in one single
Speaker 3: unified interface and system. So all of you know how
Speaker 3: much Anthropics models have improved since the beginning of the year.
Speaker 3: What has it led to for us, our revenue actually
Speaker 3: triples since the beginning of the year. It's just been
Speaker 3: five months in the year and our revenue is already
Speaker 3: tripled to what that's So we're actually like very happy
Speaker 3: with all these companies's progress and they completely deserve their IPOs,
Speaker 3: so we're very excited for them.
Speaker 1: Can I follow up to are you able to discuss
Speaker 1: what that revenues jumped to? There were reports in the
Speaker 1: ft that you're up to about four hundred and fifty
Speaker 1: million dollars just in.
Speaker 3: The and March. Yeah, we crossed that. I think I
Speaker 3: publicly tweeted that we cross five hundred million about some
Speaker 3: somewhere around mid April. We are announcing new numbers yet,
Speaker 3: but we're doing really well.
Speaker 2: Irvin. I've been thinking a lot about where perplexity sits
Speaker 2: in the suite of available tools and technologies. Right research
Speaker 2: seems to be a really interesting place with perplexity, And
Speaker 2: I'm wondering, like how you measure the engagement on the platform,
Speaker 2: so like it's not just like one query and done,
Speaker 2: but do you kind of track the time that an
Speaker 2: individual desk or user would stick with one query as
Speaker 2: sort of indication of success, you know, how the platform
Speaker 2: is being used, the behaviors of the userbase.
Speaker 3: So we're actually not trying to maximize engagement per user
Speaker 3: in the sense we're not actually trying to keep them
Speaker 3: longer on the platform or something. In fact, like accurate
Speaker 3: accuracy is somewhat like towards the opposite end of that,
Speaker 3: like if you give the user an accurate answer in
Speaker 3: the first turn, it's likely that they're not going to
Speaker 3: continue in the same chat. What we actually look at
Speaker 3: is like retentive uses, like if the same user is
Speaker 3: using Perplexity for a lot more research tasks, not just
Speaker 3: like that one single task that came with and that's
Speaker 3: that's always been the case. For example, we introduce a
Speaker 3: max plan, and that's already like you know, at the
Speaker 3: beginning of the year, in terms of subscriptions, split between
Speaker 3: the max plan that is a two hundred dollars month
Speaker 3: plan versus the pro plan was somethad like nine is
Speaker 3: to ninety one. Today it's more like thirties to seventy.
Speaker 3: So I think that that already shows that they are
Speaker 3: these power users who are willing to pay like two
Speaker 3: thousand dollars a year out of pocket. This is not
Speaker 3: even enterprise because they allow these supreior research and orchestration
Speaker 3: and accuracy that we bring in our product.
Speaker 1: Interesting, So we're seeing the growth you're talking about your
Speaker 1: average revenue run rate right tripling, going up to almost
Speaker 1: five hour million dollars. I'm interested as to where the
Speaker 1: combative nature does come in because it looks like you're
Speaker 1: playing well with all the other players out there. But
Speaker 1: there are some issues in the courts in particular, CNN,
Speaker 1: for example, has just the latest to hit you with
Speaker 1: a lawsuit alledging that you violated federal copyright laws. How
Speaker 1: are you dealing with how people get paid and what
Speaker 1: you train upon and what you feed and source to
Speaker 1: us as a user.
Speaker 3: I mean, the fact of the matter is that, like,
Speaker 3: nobody has any copyright over truth and facts. Like I
Speaker 3: think we've being consistent with our position. We're very confident
Speaker 3: in our position, and we will let the legal process,
Speaker 3: you know, decide what the right thing is in that
Speaker 3: particular situation. I don't want to comment further on that,
Speaker 3: but nobody has any copyright over truth in facts.
Speaker 1: Perplexity CEO staying up late. It is like eleven thirty
Speaker 1: pm with you. We so appreciate you coming by after
Speaker 1: your Yeah jet lag works worldwide. Our of industry and
Speaker 1: of ours safe flight back from Taiwan, we appreciate it.