The CEO of Perplexity AI insists that his company is doing just fine, thank you very much.
Responding to a user theory suggesting that the company is suffering glitches because it’s “doing horribly financially,” CEO Aravind Srinivas took to his haters’ home turf — that is, the r/Perplexity_AI subreddit — to set the record straight.
In the original trash-talking post, user “nothingeverhappen” alleged, per a “campus strategist” they know, that Perplexity had “paused all funding for marketing and partnerships.” They also claimed that the wannabe Google competitor is “going public on the stock market” — a move they wagered would “only” happen if Perplexity needed a “massive cash injection.”
Additionally, the user said they suspected that the AI search company may be cutting costs in other ways, including that it seems to revert to “auto mode” regardless of user preference — a reference to Perplexity’s drop-down which, like most other chatbots, lets users toggle between its quicker, more basic model and its slower “deep research” mode.
Speculation of this sort isn’t unusual once a company reaches a valuation in the billions, as Perplexity has — and Perplexity has given folks plenty to kvetch about with its hallucination-happy AI search engine that has been roundly accused of plagiarism.
Still, Srinivas chose to respond directly to the peanut gallery.
“The user shouldn’t have to learn so much to use a product,” the CEO wrote. “That’s the motivation with ‘Auto’ mode. Let the AI decide for the user if it’s a quick-fast-answer query, or a slightly-slower-multi-step pro-search query, or slow-reasoning-mode query, or a really slow deep research query.”
“Our goal isn’t to save money and scam you in any way,” he continued. “It’s genuinely to build a better product with less clutter and simple selector for customization options for the technically adept and well-informed users.”
As for the OP’s claim that Perplexity is “going public,” Srinivas retorted that the claim wasn’t true — and that the company has no plans to do an initial public offering (IPO) until at least 2028.
“We have all the funding we’ve raised,” he said, “and our revenue is only growing.”
Of course, Srinivas could well be presenting a personally convenient vision of the future, given that many believe the AI bubble is fit to burst. Still, the claims from Perplexity’s detractors don’t hold that much water — and responding so unequivocally is generally the best route to quelling investor clamminess, anyway.
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