How Perplexity Chief Aravind Srinivas Made Headlines This Week From expressing conflicting views to that of Infosys chief to launching a USD one million grant, here's how the Indian AI founder became the talk of the tech town

Leading an artificial intelligence (AI) startup with a valuation of USD nine billion, Aravind Srinivas is a rising and prominent name in the tech space globally. The Indian-origin CEO of Perplexity– deemed as a serious competition to Google– Srinivas recently took to the microblogging platform X to voice his differing views to Infosys co-founder and chairman Nandan Nilekani's stance on concentrating on developing applications using pre-existing models and bypassing model training skills.

While acknowledging the work and contribution made by the Infosys chief, the startup founder highlighted that it was 'essential to do both.'

"He's wrong on pushing Indians to ignore model training skills and just focus on building on top of existing models," he tweeted.

Several users praised and supported his views with one sharing, "Until we build products we will never be able to lead the pack, we will always remain followers in this dollar-to-rupee conversion mindset."
At the Meta AI Summit in October, Nilekani advised startups to steer clear of the expensive task of developing large AI models, and instead focus their resources on creating practical AI solutions. "Our goal should not be to build one more LLM. Let the big boys in the (Silicon) Valley do it, spending billions of dollars," he said.

Later, in December, he said, "Foundation models are not the best use of your money. If India has $50 billion to spend, it should use that to build compute, infrastructure, and AI cloud. These are the raw materials and engines of this game."

Srinivas later went on to expand on the 'India training its foundation models debate', "I feel like India fell into the same trap I did while running Perplexity. Thinking models are going to cost a shit ton of money to train. But India must show the world that it's capable of ISRO-like feet for AI."

"I think that's possible for AI, given the recent achievements of DeepSeek. So, I hope India changes its stance from wanting to reuse models from open-source and instead trying to build muscle to train their models that are not just good for Indic languages but are globally competitive on all benchmarks." DeepSeek, a Chinese AI entity, recently quietly released its new models, DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero, said to be at par with OpenAI's o1– its most advanced offering to date.

I am ready to invest a $1mm personally and 5 hours/week of my time into the most qualified group of people that can do this right now for making India great again in the context of AI. Consider this as a commitment that cannot be backtracked. The team has to be cracked and… https://t.co/g6ItsPL0uc

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) January 22, 2025

"I'm not in a position to run a DeepSeek-like company for India, but I'm happy to help anyone obsessed enough to do it and open-source the models," the Perplexity CEO said further adding that he was willing to invest "$1mm personally and 5 hours/week of my time" into people "that can do this right now."

"And beating DeepSeek R1 on all benchmarks with rigor will mean I will invest $10mm more," he added.

This commitment caught the former Union Minister of State for IT Rajeev Chandrasekhar's attention. "I hope some of you out there take up this offer of @AravSrinivas and get to building AI and India's deepseek!"

Amid this, Perplexity launched Sonar, an API for AI search. "While most generative AI features today have answers informed only by training data, this limits their capabilities," Perplexity wrote in a blog post. "To optimize for factuality and authority, APIs require a real-time connection to the Internet, with answers informed by trusted sources."

Introducing Sonar: Perplexity's API.

Sonar is the most affordable search API product on the market. Use it to build generative search, powered by real-time information and citations, into your apps. We're also offering a Pro version with deeper functionality. pic.twitter.com/CWpVUUKYtW

— Perplexity (@perplexity_ai) January 21, 2025

With Sonar and Sonar Pro API, developers can build custom generative search capabilities powered with unparalleled real-time, web-wide research, and citations. The startup claims Sonar Pro outperforms competitors on a benchmark that measures factual correctness in AI chatbot answers, SimpleQA.

"It's much better than Gemini-2.0-Flash (with search grounding). And way cheaper too. We won't be training on your data," Srinivas posted on LinkedIn. Shortly, he announced making Perplexity Pro free to students, faculty and staff of IIT Madras.