Aravind Srinivas looked up to Google CEO Sundar Pichai before building Perplexity AI; how an unexpected detail stayed with him

Aravind Srinivas is the CEO of Perplexity AI. Not many people know that he used to admire Google CEO Sundar Pichai before building an AI-powered platform that would go on to compete with Google. According to a report by WIRED, Srinivas revealed that he watched a YouTube video about Pichai.

What did Srinivas talk about?

Srinivas said he watched an interview of Pichai where he discussed his morning routine, including reading newspapers, drinking tea and eating an omelette.

Srinivas grew up in a vegetarian household and shared that interview with his mother while trying to convince her to let him eat eggs.


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All about Aravind Srinivas

He grew up in Chennai and studied electrical engineering at IIT Madras and earned a PhD in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley. Before he started Perplexity, he worked at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind. There, he gained experience in artificial intelligence research.

Aravind Srinivas co-founded Perplexity AI in 2022 with Andy Konwinski, Denis Yarats and Johnny Ho. They initially experimented with tools that allowed users to search Twitter data through natural-language questions. They later shifted towards general web search.

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Competition with Google

Perplexity was launched in 2022 and its search engine used AI to generate direct answers with citations and links to sources. The company sought to make searches conversational and it allowed users to ask follow-up questions and explore a topic without starting over.

This approach put it in competition with Google, which began introducing its own AI-generated search experiences. The competition extended beyond the quality of search results to the broader question of whether users would prefer conversational answers or traditional search links.

Perplexity later expanded beyond search with Perplexity Computer, a product designed to coordinate AI models to complete tasks such as research, coding, writing and other computer-based work.

In February 2026, WIRED reported that Perplexity was moving away from plans to introduce advertising into its search product. The company argued that advertising could undermine trust in AI-generated answers.