Perplexity founder Aravind Srinivas explains the “user is never wrong” philosophy of Larry Page

And the final philosophy I take from Larry, I want to highlight here is there's this philosophy called the user is never wrong. It's a very powerful, profound thing. It's very simple but profound. If you like truly believe in it, you can blame the user for not prompt engineering, right? My mom is not very good at English. She uses perplexity and she just comes and tells me the answer is not relevant. And I look at her query and I'm like, first instinct is like come on, you didn't type a proper sentence here. But then I realized, okay, like is it her fault? Like the product should understand her intent. Despite that this is a story that Larry says they just tried to sell Google to Excite. They did a demo to the Excite CEO where they would fire Excite and Google together and type in the same query like university. And then in Google you would rank Stanford, Michigan and stuff Exact would just have like random arbitrary universities and. And the exact CEO would look at it and say if you typed in this query it would have worked on Excite too. But that's like a simple philosophy thing. You just flip that and say whatever the user types, you're always supposed to give high quality answers. Then you build a product for that. You do all the magic behind the scenes so that even if the user was lazy, even if there were typos, even if the speech transcription was wrong, they still got the answer and they allowed the product. And that forces you to do a lot of things that are Corey focused on the user. And also this is where I believe the whole prompt engineering like trying to be a good prompt engineer is not going to be a long term thing. I think you want to make products work where user doesn't even ask for something but you know that they want it and you give it to them without them even asking for it. People are lazy and a better product should be one that allows you to be more lazy, not less. Products need to be having some magic to them them and the magic comes from letting you be more lazy.