December 7, 2022, seven days later OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a former OpenAI research scientist named Aravind Srinivaswho had left the company three months earlier, launched a competing AI chatbot called Perplexity. “Everyone was obsessed with ChatGPT. We were the only product to come out and say that references and citations are important. So from the beginning we cared about that. Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AIsaid during an on-stage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on October 30.

Lately, Perplexity has been in a lot of hot water for exactly the problem that Srinivas set out to solve two years ago. Last month, the company was sued by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post, both owned by News Corp, for plagiarizing their content in search results. A few days earlier, the New York Times sent a “cease and desist” notice to the startup asking it to stop using the newspaper’s content on its site.

Perplexity is at the forefront of so-called AI answer engines, which aim to answer specific user questions by summarizing information on the Internet, instead of simply providing links in response to a few keywords. Srinivas said the median query entered into Perplexity’s answer engine is 10 to 11 words, compared to two to three for Google Search, suggesting that users are coming to Perplexity with more thoughtful questions.

Srinivas asserted that Perplexity “always cites its sources” and “does not claim ownership of any content.” “It’s just about surfacing content on the web, summarizing it in a way that the user can digest it, and then telling you where they get all that information,” he said, adding that this sounds exactly like how journalists do their jobs and therefore should not be considered plagiarism.

However, he admitted that, like other rapidly evolving AI applications, Perplexity’s current security guardrails are not perfect and could be easily circumvented through rapid engineering – a fashionable term describing the practice consisting of designing inputs for AI tools that will produce optimal results.

The new publications that sued Perplexity claim that the AI ​​company is competing for the same audience as theirs by using copyrighted content. But Srinivas said Perplexity users don’t come to the app to see daily news, but to “make sense of what’s happening.”

“For example, how does this particular news affect me? Given the current news, should I continue to buy more Nvidia stock? These are not the kinds of questions you can ask TechCrunch, but you come and ask Perplexity,” the CEO said.

Recognizing that reported information is critical to providing value to Perplexity’s product, earlier this year the company launched a unique program share advertising revenue with press publishers. He currently works with Time, Fortune and the German news site Der Spiegel.

But ultimately, Srinivas believes no one should be entitled to the facts. “Our belief is that the facts must be universally disseminated to everyone,” he said. “Imagine a world in which scientists claim ownership of a certain fact and other people cannot state it. Knowledge and truth cannot be spread in this way.

Srinivas, a native of India and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley, was a research intern at DeepMind and Google. Before co-founding Perplexity, he was a research scientist at OpenAI for about a year.