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Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas at HubSpot INBOUND 25<\/p>\n
Ron Schmelzer at HubSpot INBOUND 25 <\/p>\n
Speaking at HubSpot\u2019s INBOUND 2025 conference, Aravind Srinivas, CEO of Perplexity, shared a message that cuts against today\u2019s noisy AI hype cycle. While most AI companies race to make models more all-encompassing and humanlike, he argued the real breakthrough lies in spurring curiosity.<\/p>\n
\u201cBefore AI, if you were curious about something, you had to gather a team, hire consultants, debate in a committee,\u201d he said. \u201cNow you can just ask.\u201d For Srinivas, the value of AI is not in replacing work, but in helping people ask better questions. The most successful employees, he claims, will be the ones who enter meetings with sharper questions, not pre-baked answers.<\/p>\n
Curiosity as Leverage<\/p>\n
Srinivas compared curiosity to leverage in business and science. He pointed to moments in history where curiosity drove innovation. Transistors grew out of challenges to the limits of vacuum tubes. John Deere reshaped agriculture by asking if steel could replace brittle iron.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf you aren\u2019t hearing \u2018that\u2019s impossible\u2019 or \u2018why would you even ask that,\u2019\u201d he said, \u201cyou\u2019re probably not asking hard enough questions.\u201d<\/p>\n
This perspective echoes comments from Satya Nadella, Microsoft\u2019s CEO, who has emphasized that AI should help people \u201creason over data, not drown in it.\u201d Where Nadella leans toward reasoning tools for enterprise scale, Srinivas takes a more personal approach, focusing on how individuals can transform the way they think inside an organization.<\/p>\n
Why Accuracy Matters When AI Goes Wrong<\/p>\n
Perplexity launched in December 2022, just a week after ChatGPT\u2019s big launch. At the time, users found AI\u2019s mistakes entertaining, sharing screenshots of absurd outputs that went viral. Perplexity\u2019s investors told Srinivas that focusing on a drier approach, adding citations and verifications to responses, made answers boring.<\/p>\n
He disagreed, \u201cOnly an accurate answer leads to the next good question.\u201d<\/p>\n
That view has become Perplexity\u2019s calling card. Its product doesn\u2019t just give responses. It cites sources and nudges users toward follow-up questions. \u201cCuriosity doesn\u2019t stop with an answer,\u201d Srinivas said. \u201cIt begins there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Critics of LLMs point out that hallucinations remain a persistent problem. Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and long-time AI critic, has argued that trust in AI hinges on verifiability, not fluency. In that sense, Perplexity\u2019s model, grounded responses with visible sources, aligns more with his call for reliability than with Silicon Valley\u2019s preference for style, moving fast, and breaking things.<\/p>\n
Building Assistants That Actually Help<\/p>\n
Srinivas wants more than citations. His team is building Comet, a browser assistant that watches Slack, email, and dashboards, then brings the right context into view. Instead of copying and pasting into a chatbot, the tool surfaces material as you work. He calls it a second brain, always nearby, never in the way.<\/p>\n
Other startups are chasing similar ideas. Adept is training AI to click around inside software. Rewind wants to record every screen interaction for recall later. OpenAI has experimented with custom GPTs that handle narrow tasks. Perplexity takes a different tack: one assistant that adapts to you, not the other way around.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou shouldn\u2019t need prompt engineering classes to get your job done,\u201d Srinivas said.<\/p>\n
Competing Philosophies in the AI Race<\/p>\n
AI companies are drifting apart in how they see the future. Some race to build bigger, faster models with broad capabilities. Perplexity is betting that reliability will win over flashy scale. Anthropic has tried to split the difference with Claude, designing it to say nothing when it isn\u2019t sure. Critics say that makes it timid.<\/p>\n
Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor studying AI in business, puts it bluntly, \u201cFor students, fluency matters. For executives, reliability does.\u201d That explains why consumer chatbots, prone to hallucinations, catch fire on social media but stumble in boardrooms.<\/p>\n
Srinivas didn\u2019t sugarcoat it. \u201cBeware of AIs that always tell you what you want to hear. Those aren\u2019t assistants. Those are sycophants.\u201d<\/p>\n
Building Curiosity as a Culture<\/p>\n
Behind the product pitch, Srinivas kept returning to a cultural theme. He argued that meetings should be judged less by polished slides and more by the quality of the questions raised. Too often, bureaucracy, status updates, and formatting bury curiosity. A good assistant, in his view, would clear the busywork so people can get back to the thrill of inquiry.<\/p>\n
That idea borrows from Slack\u2019s co-founder Stewart Butterfield, who once said software should reduce \u201cwork about work.\u201d Srinivas extends it. He thinks AI can revive the creative spark inside organizations, giving employees more room to think and question instead of just executing operations.<\/p>\n
The hard part will be execution. Digital assistants have been promised before, and Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant all stumbled. Perplexity is wagering that a focus on accuracy and curiosity will keep it from the same fate. Whether that pays off depends on whether people really want more than quick answers from LLMs.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas at HubSpot INBOUND 25 Ron Schmelzer at HubSpot INBOUND 25 Speaking at HubSpot\u2019s INBOUND…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4467,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[365,6032,363,6033,111,139,69,6031,145],"class_list":{"0":"post-4466","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-technology","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-aravind-srinivas","10":"tag-artificial-intelligence","11":"tag-llm","12":"tag-new-zealand","13":"tag-newzealand","14":"tag-nz","15":"tag-perplexity","16":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4466","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4466"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4466\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4467"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4466"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4466"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4466"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}