Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas explains how ChatGPT's success revealed demand for answers with citations. Early investor Daniel Gross pointed out a critical flaw: the UI made search feel like a slow submit button instead of instant results.
Daniel Gross
ChatGPT then releases three days later and the whole world just changes. Everyone's like, this is a technology we never even knew we wanted, but now that we have it, we just like don't want to go back. And they did one thing which is they had a knowledge cut opportunity and they don't have citations, they don't have like grounding in facts. So there was a space for somebody else to come and put a fact grounded, citation powered answer bot. And we already had it. It's not even like we had to build it in like three days. We already had it. We just had to put together a web front end and then we got it ready quickly. We sent it to a few investors. I remember my first feedback was from this guy I really respect, Daniel Gross. And he said, arvind, this is cool. As in, like, it's not a hit button for your query, it's a submit button. Because it's that slow. Takes like 10 seconds to get an answer. It's almost like I'm submitting a job. So you should call it a submit button and have a queue of queries or something.
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