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Aravind Srinivas

What Aravind Srinivas thinks about LLMs

@aravind-srinivas · 20 positions · 0 changes of mind

Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, an AI answer engine; previously a research scientist at OpenAI and a PhD student at UC Berkeley.

Aravind Srinivas did not write this page.

We collected these quotes from things they published elsewhere, and every quote links to where it was said. They have no account here and have not endorsed this site. Quotes are word for word; the short line under each one is our own restatement, not their wording. Their own site. Is this you? Claim it or ask us to remove it. Or tell us what is wrong here.

8 dated positions, 2024, in their own words. Our reading of what Aravind Srinivas has said — not written or endorsed by them.

  1. Our readingOpen-sourcing capable models matters because it is the only thing standing between us and a world where two or three companies control the frontier.

    Their wordsAnd it gives hope for a world where we can have more players instead of two or three companies controlling the most capable models. And that’s why I think it’s very important that he succeeds and that his success also enables the success of many others.

    ↗Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434youtube.com 6th of 20 in this recording

  3. Our readingCuriosity is the thing AI has not cracked: a model can research a question thoroughly, but it cannot decide which question is worth asking.

    Their wordsWhat makes humans special though, is our curiosity. Even if AI’s cracked this, it’s us still asking them to go explore something. And one thing that I feel like AI’s haven’t cracked yet, is being naturally curious and coming up with interesting questions to understand the world and going and digging deeper about them.

    ↗Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434youtube.com 11th of 20 in this recording

  5. Our readingThe dangerous concentration of power in AI comes from who can afford the compute, not from who holds the model weights.

    Their wordsIt’s less about access to a model’s weights, it’s more access to compute that is putting the world in more concentration of power and few individuals. Because not everyone’s going to be able to afford this much amount of compute to answer the hardest questions.

    ↗Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434youtube.com 12th of 20 in this recording

  7. Our readingOnce a language model reads the results, search can trade precision for recall, because the model does not care that the right link came ninth.

    Their wordsIn Google, even though we call it 10 blue links, you get annoyed if you don’t even have the right link in the first three or four. The eye is so tuned to getting it right. LLMs are fine. You get the right link maybe in the 10th or ninth. You feed it in the model. It can still know that that was more relevant than the first.

    ↗Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434youtube.com 15th of 20 in this recording

    Google

  9. Our readingOwning the dominant model is not worth chasing, because no user has ever cared which model produced a good answer.

    Their wordsDoes the user care if Perplexity has the most dominant model in order to come and use the product? No. Does the user care about a good answer? Yes. So whatever model is providing us the best answer, whether we fine-tuned it from somebody else’s base model or a model we host ourselves, it’s okay.

    ↗Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434youtube.com 16th of 20 in this recording

  11. Our readingIf reasoning can be separated from facts, the frontier labs lose their advantage, because nobody needs a million-GPU cluster any more.

    Their wordsBut any breakthrough can disrupt that. If you can decouple reasoning and facts and end up with much smaller models that can reason really well, you don’t need a million H100 equivalent cluster.

    ↗Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434youtube.com 17th of 20 in this recording

  13. Our readingEvery announcement of a longer context window hides the cost, which is that the model gets worse at following instructions.

    Their wordsSo most people, when they advertise new context window increase, they talk a lot about finding the needle in the haystack sort of evaluation metrics and less about whether there’s any degradation in the instruction following performance. So I think that’s where you need to make sure that throwing more information at a model doesn’t actually make it more confused.

    ↗Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434youtube.com 19th of 20 in this recording

  15. Our readingWe will spend more of our working hours talking to AIs than to other people, but AI companionship should not be the answer to loneliness.

    Their wordsLoneliness is one of the major problems in people. That said, I don’t want that to be the solution for humans seeking relationships and connections. I do see a world where we spend more time talking to AIs than other humans, at least for our work time.

    ↗Aravind Srinivas: Perplexity CEO on Future of AI, Search & the Internet | Lex Fridman Podcast #434youtube.com 20th of 20 in this recording