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