Perplexity's model-neutral strategy benefits from specialization

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 47:00

   when you got Sam Altman over here raising $100 billion, and then you have Elon putting data centers in space and merging with SpaceX and Twitter. You have Google with unlimited resources, Amazon getting in the game, and obviously Gemini, a very strong product, and Google really good at consumer. I think we'd all agree Facebook and Meta haven't figured it out yet, except maybe for serving us better ads, but they haven't figured out the consumer case yet, but they'll copy it. They always do. How do you look at the playing field? Because the degree of difficulty this isn't playing checkers or this is like playing against the 10 best chess players in the world that's what you have to do every day yeah so how do you think about it long-term and independent company do you think you'll need to join forces at some point

2. 47:51

   well and why didn't you take the deal this deals were incredible that you got offered so one advantage we have that all these companies you mentioned don't have is the multi-model orchestration we're like switzerland we don't have to have one horse in the race if gpt wins gemini wins claude wins llama wins it doesn't matter to us uh or even open source models can win no problem you have them on the service yes deep seek and kimmy we have kimmy we have nematron and we have a lot of usage of quen Alibaba Quinn yeah silently under the hood so for us like that advantage of being able to take the best in each model and give the user the orchestra of everything they can do I don't think any of the companies you mentioned can do that right nor would they nor would they it makes no sense for them it would be an admission that all the data centers and capex they've built out mean still

3. 48:48

   couldn't produce them the best model. And Dario, CEO of Anthropics, said recently in an interview that models are specializing. Towards the beginning of last year, people thought models are going to commoditize. But towards the end of last year, models started specializing. Even with encoding, Cloud Code and Codex have very different capabilities. Our iOS engineers love using codex our backend engineers love using cloud code yeah so even within a specialization like coding models have their own unique specialties and there are many other use cases outside coding where different models are good at different things which means the orchestra conductor that has no one model to the horse in the race can win by providing a very unique value and service to the customer that each of these amazing names that you mentioned cannot