Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas discusses AI-native small businesses and local inference

NEW: I sat down w/ Perplexity Founder & CEO Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) on why AI-native SMBs could drive the next American millionaire economic boom. @perplexity_ai, valued at ~$20B with ~$2B in reported funding, $750M in annualized revenue as of August, seeing 5x YoY revenue growth as it expands from search into autonomous agents. One example Aravind shared is a single-person company generating $3M in annual revenue while spending over $1M a year on Perplexity Computer. His thesis is that AI could fundamentally change the economics of building a business. Smaller teams, less capital, higher productivity, & entirely new business models. At the infrastructure layer, Aravind sees a shift toward local & hybrid inference, with AI agents operating across personal devices and the cloud. As context windows expand and workloads become more personalized, local compute becomes increasingly cost-competitive, while offering greater privacy, control & data sovereignty. We cover: › Why SMBs could become a major driver of US GDP growth › The shift from AI models to agents & recursive economics › Why Perplexity is betting on your Mac instead of building data centers › NVIDIA, Apple Silicon, local inference & sovereign AI › Why writing code is no longer the bottleneck, but problem-solving is 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 (00:00) Aravind Srinivas, Co-founder & CEO of Perplexity (01:30) Why Perplexity's brand is built on curiosity (04:47) Every great invention starts with one question (08:18) How to build a $1T company in America alone (12:36) The next big companies will be tiny (13:45) Is the American dream still alive? (16:28) Stop blaming users for bad prompts (22:55) How Perplexity quietly grew 5x (26:51) The solopreneur spending $1M a year on Perplexity (28:28) "We don't have competitors, we have contributors" (29:20) The data center is coming to your laptop (34:32) Orchestrating up with NVIDIA, down with Apple (36:11) What happens when your AI agent knows everything (39:17) Why Perplexity is skipping the data center race (41:25) Stop asking AI to write code, ask it to think (45:47) Perplexity’s answer to AI security (48:27) The Hugging Face incident & multi-agent threats (50:45) Turning everyone into a scientist (53:31) Why Perplexity isn’t chasing a billion users