Perplexity’s AI got some answers wrong, but it helped Aravind Srinivas find his first users

Perplexity did not need a big marketing campaign to get its first users talking. Some people discovered the AI search startup by typing their own social media handles into its search bar. The answers were not always accurate but they were often surprising enough that made people share screenshots online.

That unexpected curiosity helped put Perplexity on the map and gave co-founder Aravind Srinivas an early reason to believe the product could work. The company had started with a different idea: making Twitter easier to search. The response to that experiment eventually pushed the team toward a broader web-search product.

During a conversation with Lex Fridman, Srinivas explained how the early tool attracted attention and why the founders decided to build on what they had learned.

Perplexity’s first experiment focused on Twitter

When Srinivas joined forces with co-founders Dennis and Johnny, the goal was to build useful products with large language models. At the time, the team was still exploring where AI could create the most value for users.

One early project focused on Twitter’s social graph. The team collected tweets through academic API accounts and built a search experience that let people ask questions about the platform’s data.

Users could explore conversations, look for tweets about artificial intelligence and identify connections between people through mutual followers. The system also used language models to turn natural language questions into SQL…