Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity's Race to Build Agentic Search

Aravind Srinivas explains why Perplexity is betting the company on a browser called Comet to outflank Google and ChatGPT on agentic search.

• Perplexity’s next big bet is an AI browser called Comet — a cognitive OS where queries, tasks, email, calendar, and purchases run as parallel async processes.
• Google’s AI overview and AI mode are the same feature relaunched each year under a different name and VP, and still not shipped to everyone.
• Google structurally cannot give direct answers on hotels, flights, or shopping because doing so destroys ad revenue from Booking, Expedia, and Amazon.
• Perplexity expects a few billion dollars annually from subscriptions alone; usage-based agent pricing and transaction cuts are the next revenue layers.
• Cursor is mandatory at Perplexity; ML researchers upload paper pseudocode screenshots and compress 3-4 day experiments to ~1 hour.
• Claude Code is described as significantly smarter than Cursor for agentic coding tasks, though AI tools are also introducing bugs engineers can’t always trace.
• Perplexity has ~200 employees and live partnerships with Selfbook, TripAdvisor, Yelp, Shopify, Affirm, and financial data provider FMP for native verticals.
• Browser stickiness comes from passwords, wallet, browsing history, and persistent agent tasks — harder to export than a ChatGPT chat dump.

2025-07-11 · Watch on YouTube