[Music] [Applause] if you're above a certain age you may have at one point in your life fired up your dialup modem and asked a virtual butler named Jeeves some questions askjeeves. com was among the numerous websites competing to become your go-to search engine in the late '90s the idea with as Jeeves was to humanize search on the web so you could type in plain English to get the answers you wanted so for example instead of typing in Titanic movie runtime you could type in how long is the movie Titanic unfortunately for ask geves the tech just wasn't there yet so instead of the answer to your question in this case 3 hours and 15 minutes you would get a page full of Blue Links based on keywords from your search today we all know that the top links we see are heavily influenced by algorithms and it can be traced back to the granddaddy of them all Google's page rank page rank determined the order you'd see those Blue Links putting importance on factors like how many other websites that website had pointing to it this helped users find more relevant websites faster combine that with a minimalist UI and Google quickly exploded in popularity going from 10,000 daily searches in 1998 to 18 million in 2000 competitors like ask geves altav Vista and Yahoo were soon forgotten and left in the dust and then came the money with millions of daily searches Google could learn user behavior and interests allowing it to display highly relevant targeted ads advertisers would then pay Google every single time somebody clicked on one of their ads this business model is now called cper click or CPC and with it Google became a money printing machine by 2006 the website offici became a verb earning a spot in the Oxford English Dictionary and since then the competition has mostly been laughable like hearing a character in a TV show say something like they're going to Bing something and why is that Google's website has gotten the occasional facelift but if you compare what search results look like now versus two decades ago not all that much has changed so how have they stayed the only relevant option yes with all of its resources Google can afford to continually invest into making their algorithm better but it can also afford to pay Apple $20 billion a year to be the default search engine on iPhones I think it's easy to forget just how much of an influence search has I mean social media is cute and everything but for retailers politicians religious leaders news media if you're not highly ranked on Google do you even EX exist You could argue that search engines are actually the way we navigate reality whether factchecking a claim or finding a new restaurant they become our window to the world a Gateway for discovering things both online and offline but lately search has also become the Battleground for the new AI race with multiple companies aiming to Dethrone Google and reshape how we search for the first time in decades it's exciting but will it be for the better and what does this mean for the future of the [Music] internet I'm bavo sudu and this is the Ted AI show where we figure out how to live and thrive in a world where AI is changing everything are your digital operations a well-oiled machine or a tangled mess is your customer experience breaking through or breaking down it's time for an operations intervention if you need to consolidate software and reduce costs if you need to mitigate risk and build resilience and if you need to speed up your pace of innovation the pager Duty operations cloud is the essential platform for operating as a modern digital business get started at pagr duty. com hi I'm belaval sadu host of Ted's newest podcast the Ted AI show where I talk with world's leading experts artists journalists to help you live and thrive in a world where AI is changing everything I'm stoked to be working with IBM our official sponsor for this episode in a recent report published by the IBM Institute of business value among those surveyed one in three companies pause an AI use case after the pilot phase and we've all been there right you get hyped about the possibilities of AI spin up a bunch of these pilot projects and then crickets those Pilots are trapped in silos your resources are exhausted and scaling feels daunting What If instead of hundreds of Pilots you had a holistic strategy that's built to scale that's what IBM can help with they have 65,000 Consultants with generative AI expertise who can help you design integrate and optimize AI Solutions learn more at ibm.
com Consulting because using AI is cool but scaling AI across your business that that's the next level and we're back with canva presents secret sounds work Edition caller guess this sound it's a mouse click so close that's actually publishing a website with canva docs next caller uh definitely a mouse click nice try it was sorting a 100 sticky notes with a canva whiteboard we also would have accepted resizing a Campa video into 10 different sizes what no way yes way one click can go a long way love your work at ca. com our guest today is Arvin serenas a former research scientist at open aai he co-founded perplexity AI in 2022 with a goal of reshaping how we search the web his new approach has already started controversy among online Publishers but Arvin insists his focus is on creating a better way for people to access knowledge not just a search engine but what he calls an answer engine hi Arvin welcome to the show thank you for having me your Bel how do you describe how perplexity is different than say a traditional search engine or even some of these chat Bots like chat GPT or Claude yeah let me break that question into two parts sure how was perplexity different from Google I think it's very easy to answer that in Google you type in keywords you type in one or two words usually like Paris Hilton age or you type in like NBA and you get the score you can type whatever you want like Nothing Stops you but Google the product will work best when you type in keywords it's fundamentally a link engine that gives you like the relevant links for whatever you ask in perplexity you can actually come and ask like 10-word questions you can ask stuff like what is the latest and greatest about the gpt1 model that the guy released today or like what is the latest about the threefold phone that Huawei released or uh if you're doing your research on like okay like should I really buy Nvidia what's going on could you pull up the latest earnings call and like tell me um what is the investor sentiment right now who are the competitors to Nvidia uh what exactly are the different technologies that are being built it should help you like figure out those things that Google's not going to help you instead Google's going to give you a link to the block post and you have to read it and come to your conclusions yourself right so that's the difference from Google Now the difference from Claud and chbt difference from Claud is very clear like CLA does not have any internet access CLA is a model very good at reasoning that compress some of the knowledge on the internet into the model so you can use it as a great brainstorming partner I use Claud when I'm like uh going to an interview an interviewing for a role that I have like very little experience hiring for but it's not going to be useful for like asking stuff about like when is the presidential debate or like can you summarize what happened in the debate it's not going to have knowledge of those events so you can't ask at timely you know current events essentially correct even even past events where you really care about the accuracy you cannot ask like what was invidious Revenue in the 2022 q1 or something like that or you canot ask like how much funding did open AI raise so far like these are all stuff that's already out there the interet it might still give you numbers but you can't really trust like what what if it got it wrong where is the source where is the verification like what if I actually want to go and fact check what the AI said so that's the weakness of claw now chaity is a little different it does have internet access they did do the browsing thing so then what's the difference between chity and perplexity I think the Nuance there is that it doesn't always browse in chat gbd yeah you know I posted this example recently of like how many Grand Slams as yanic won and it said he has not won any slam but but it also prefaced by saying uh I I as of been knowledge with September 2024 so it does try to do as as live as possible so I don't even know if it browse the web or not for this query it's not always clear what queries related to live event or something happened in the past and so that's why like people still use perplexity when they when they already know ahead of time they want accuracy and facts and citations and so like all that which chity doesn't do reliably and I think like it's very difficult to do one thing properly like for perplexity if we just wanted to be you know as good as Google on everything Google does it's a losing battle they perfected that game for like 25 years that's why we trying to like change the game hey like you know Google like great you're you're the king of links and I want to be the king of answers let's play that game why are search engines so vital to the internet we all need knowledge every day we all want to make sense of things right like that's a fundamental human need people started with uh C walls like Scrolls manuscripts and and then the printing press arrived and that made knowledge dissemination a lot more easier so basically as knowledge start getting distributed more and more widely as a marginal cost of distribution went to zero there's basically an infinite amount of knowledge out there but that also means someone has to do the work of making the job of finding it easy for you right and allowing to digest all the information relevant to what you want in the most easy like friendly user friendly way in fact uh if you in the late 90s there there used to be a product called ask GES oh yeah totally and that did not work because it was too early to build a question answering engine using the technology that existed back then at that time nobody even thought search was important they all thought the internet was going to be a portal and Yahoo's already cracked it before we get into that I I do want to want to ask you if if you have to answer the question of like what is the current state of the internet and what do you not like about it I think the current state of the internet is there's a lot of like like lowquality content obviously right there's a lot of confusion of course there's a lot of like misinformation and so like that valuable content that exists in like 1 or 2% of the internet is even harder to find now you have to scroll you have to sift Google realized that like as more and more data gets created on the internet the the need for search also exponentially increases so Google identified a great hack called the 10 Blue Links and then the internet kept on growing growing growing to the extent where 10 Blue Links was no longer the best format for consuming information that's why people got frustrated with Google search they chose to build a business model around link clicks so it's very hard for them to change the UI despite that they have attempted to do it through like these one boxes and answer answers extracted answers and things like that but it's still pretty difficult for them to blend everything into one single UI and now the information is so vast so complex and like the world is also getting more entropic like like the amount of craziness and Randomness in the world has obviously exploded so that just means the need to ask questions is increasing the other thing is each website has a ton of ads in them you know popups banners and the the moment like you're done with all like you know like like uh shutting them down and actually like trying to read the stuff that you really want is hidden somewhere in the third or fourth paragraph right and that's what we are trying to change let me ask you to that point if I flip that around and ask you what does the ideal internet look like to you and how does perplexity work towards that ideal internet I think the ideal internet is where like there's a thriving ecosystem of like good content creation but more focused on content and adding value rather than like trying to get link click traffic elaborate on that it's it's a Nuance Point look I mean like clickbaits is like a term right like why is that because you want people to click you want people to get you want traffic you want referals you want like attention uh attention and uh you're not actually focusing on like adding new knowledge to the internet if you added new knowledge to Internet it's going to be possible for actually delivering value to the user and the way you get the knowledge discovered to people is through like their questions not keywords anymore and when people ask a question and the stuff that you wrote on your side is like actually pretty useful to be able to answer that then um you're getting attributed for it and like your content is part of the answer and people derive value from it and people might want to even dig deeper into what you wrote and might come actually visit you and like learn more and it's like a way higher intent in terms of like the reason for visiting your site and also this makes people ask even more questions I have a pretty high conviction that it's not taking search traffic away from Google that will work if that was true then Microsoft Bing should have succeeded by now the amount of money they've spent on this right true I think it's more that the fundamental consumer behavior of asking questions is an increasing Trend the fundamental consumer behavior of typing in one word to get to a site is is a saturated Trend it's over and interestingly it's possible suddenly like after all these 2 and a half decades to do what as CH was originally wanted to do because you have the technology today in the form of large language models which have been like a fantastic invention and we were at the right place at the right time to identify this core need so that became perplexity all right listeners real quick I want to give you a better idea of what using perplex is actually like especially compared to Google all right so I'm going to go ahead and type into perplexity Ai and I'm going to ask it who is Arvin shavas so instead of a list of Blue Links of possibly relevant websites it's giving this structured layout almost like a Wikipedia page synthesized On Demand with citations to all the websites and then at the bottom it gives you related searches there's a background section education professional experience with different bullet points summar in all of these different web pages all distilled into a single answer the need to ask questions like was always there but people didn't have that power so once they started getting used to that habit that habit has just been increasing worldwide like majority of the world doesn't even know that they can they can go somewhere and ask questions and get answers and that Trend that consumer behavior is not all going to happen on Google maybe some of it will still happen on Google and so that's where the opportunity lies for for a new player hi I'm belaval sadu host of Ted's newest podcast the Ted AI show where I talk with the world's leading experts artists journalists to help you live and thrive in a world where AI is changing everything I'm stoked to be working with IBM our official sponsor for this episode in a recent report published by the IBM Institute of business value among those surveyed one in three companies pause an AI use case after the pilot phase and we've all been there right you get hyped about the possibilities of AI spin up a bunch of these pilot projects and then crickets those Pilots are trapped in silos your resources are exhausted and scaling feels daunting What If instead of hundreds of Pilots you had a holistic strategy that's built to scale that's what IBM can help with they have 65,000 Consultants with generative AI expertise who can help you design integrate and optimize AI Solutions learn more at ibm. com Consulting because using AI is cool but scaling AI across your business that's the next level support for the show comes from LinkedIn where are my B2B marketers 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