Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas on hybrid AI, the Microsoft partnership, and why being chip- and model-agnostic is a feature, not a weakness.
The core thesis: AI inference will shift from purely server-side to a hybrid of local and cloud — orchestrated intelligently based on accuracy, privacy, cost, and power efficiency. Perplexity Computer is their bet on becoming that neutral orchestration layer, sitting above the OS wars (Apple vs Microsoft) and the model wars (OpenAI vs Anthropic).
New this week: a personal computer version for Windows with full Microsoft 365 integration, following a Mac launch a month ago. Waitlist opens imminently, app ships later in June.
The competitive moat argument is interesting: every time OpenAI and Anthropic compete, Perplexity wins — because they run on all of them. Srinivas claims revenue has tripled since January, attributing it directly to Anthropic’s model improvements.
Worth watching.
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