It used to feel like magic. Now it can feel like a set of cheap tricks. Is the problem with Google — or with us? And is Google Search finally facing a real rival, in the form of A.I.-powered “answer engines”?
Hey there, it's Stephen Dubner.
About a year and a half ago, we published an episode called is Google getting worse?
We talked about Google's near monopoly over Internet search, and we looked at a startup called Neva that was trying to compete against Google.
Well, Neva has already shut down, so maybe it will be impossible to dislodge Google.
Or maybe not.
Since we put out that episode, a new kind of competitor has emerged, search engines powered by artificial intelligence.
You've probably already heard about chat GPT, but the one I was interested in hearing more about is called perplexity.
So today we are going to replay that earlier Google episode.
But first, I'd like you to hear a new conversation we just recorded with this would be rival.
Google created the greatest business model on the Internet.
It just has to be rethought.
That is Aravind Srinivas.
I'm the co founder and CEO of Perplexity.
Perplexity is what describe it to someone who, like a grandmother, an uncle, someone who doesn't know a whole lot about how this works.
Perplexity is a conversational answer engine.
So you ask it a question and it just gives you the answers.
And it also tells you where it pulled the relevant information for the answer from the sources.
So it's saving you all the time that you otherwise would have spent browsing the Internet and opening these different tabs and reading all of them for yourself and being pretty confused about what you should take away.
Now, if I didn't know that you were the CEO of Perplexity, I might think you were the CEO of Chat GPT, because what you're describing sounds the way that chat GPT works to a large degree.
Are you simply a later, slightly more up to date version than chat GPT, or are you substantially different?