By TOI Tech Desk
Publication Date: 2026-03-28 11:23:00
Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas has revealed a piece of career advice he received from OpenAI‘s Sam Altman years ago—one that he says shaped his confidence in machine learning and, eventually, his path to building a billion-dollar AI company. In a podcast conversation that recently went viral on X, Srinivas recalled asking Altman a direct question: how do you figure out what you’re naturally good at?Altman’s answer was disarmingly simple—pursue whatever comes easy to you but seems hard to other people. It’s a heuristic that flips the usual “follow your passion” advice on its head, and Srinivas says it put words to something he’d already experienced firsthand.
A brute-force contest win that changed everything
Srinivas explained why that advice hit home by sharing a story from his undergraduate days at IIT Madras. A friend told him about a data science competition—similar to Kaggle—where the winner would land an internship. At the time, Srinivas had no formal training in machine learning. He didn’t know what Random Forests or Decision Trees meant.Instead of studying the theory, he took the scikit-learn…