AMA With Aravind (Perplexity)
Andrej Karpathy: Vibe Coding
Skip the Landline: Why Perplexity AI Must Leap Boldly Into the Future
India’s telecommunications story is now legend: it never fully built out landline infrastructure. Instead, it leapfrogged directly to mobile phones, embracing wireless connectivity at scale. This wasn’t just a technological pivot—it was a developmental slingshot. What India lacked in legacy systems, it made up for in agility, affordability, and scale.
Perplexity AI sits at a similarly strategic moment. While incumbents like Apple and Microsoft struggle to retrofit their empires around AI, Perplexity is born native to this new paradigm. Apple is a hardware titan trying to thread AI into legacy products like the iPhone and Mac. Microsoft is wielding AI as a bolt-on to Office and Windows—powerful, yes, but also inherently constrained by decades of product DNA and user expectations.
Perplexity, in contrast, is not retrofitting. It’s inventing. From the ground up.
And therein lies both its superpower and its risk.
The AI-Native Advantage
Adding AI to existing tools is not the same as reimagining workflows around AI. Just as mobile-first design isn’t just about shrinking a desktop app, AI-first architecture isn’t just about sprinkling prompts on top of search or documents. It requires rethinking how humans interface with knowledge, automation, and problem-solving.
Perplexity, OpenAI, and a few other players understand this. Their tools feel different. They assume a new starting point: that the user is in conversation with intelligence, not just clicking through menus or reading static content. The result is dynamic, fluid, and often delightfully surprising.
But bold vision isn’t enough. Execution matters. And the trap ahead is hesitation.
Comet Is Not a Browser
Perplexity's upcoming product, Comet, has been described as a browser. But that may be a limiting frame. Comet should not aim to imitate Chrome or Safari with AI tacked on. Instead, it should redefine what it means to navigate and interact with the internet. Imagine a digital space where:
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You don't "search" — you converse with an AI that already knows your goals.
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You don’t manage tabs — the AI orchestrates contexts for you across tasks.
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You don’t install plugins — you compose workflows by talking to agents.
That’s not a browser. That’s an AI operating layer for the web. A cockpit for human-machine collaboration. A command center for life and work. “Browser” is too timid a term. “Comet” should evolve into its own category—a co-pilot platform for knowledge navigation and action.
The Real Risk: Playing It Safe
The mistake Perplexity could make is thinking too small. Not going bold. Not raising enough capital. Not building fast and deep in emerging markets like India, where the leapfrog spirit thrives. The Indian developer and founder ecosystem is vast, young, and hungry. India doesn’t want to be a consumer of AI—it wants to build it. If Perplexity doesn’t go there aggressively, someone else will.
Imagine the upside:
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A million Indian developers building agents, apps, and integrations on a Perplexity-native framework.
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An entire population using Comet not just to browse, but to live on the web via AI.
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Government, education, and healthcare institutions reinventing themselves using AI-native workflows on Perplexity rails.
Closing Thought: Leap, Don’t Integrate
The AI-native future is not about integration. It’s about invention.
India didn’t integrate landlines. It skipped them.
Perplexity shouldn’t integrate AI into old paradigms. It should skip them—and build something radically new.
The time is now. The imagination must be vast. The ambition must be global. The capital must be abundant. And the vision must be unshackled from what the web used to be.
Because what comes next isn’t a better browser.
It’s a new frontier.
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— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) June 5, 2025
India never built landlines.
It went straight to mobile.
That leap unlocked scale, speed, and affordability.
Perplexity AI is at a similar crossroads. While Apple & Microsoft retrofit legacy tech, Perplexity is AI-native from day one. A huge advantage. 🧵
Aggregation at its finest https://t.co/oZ5DGjC9EL
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) June 5, 2025
