Denis is co-founder & CTO at Perplexity, one of my favorite products and one of the most successful AI startups today. Perplexity was founded less than two years ago and has just raised $250M in venture capital, at a $2B+ evaluation.

With Denis, we talked about the state of AI products and his vision of where they're going. Then we talked about Perplexity as a company, how the team is organized, how engineers work, and how they use AI themselves.

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I am sorry for the bad audio quality on my side 🙏 the recording picked up the wrong mic and we realized it only during editing 🙏

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Here is what we talked about:

(02:04) Introduction

(03:08) The History of Perplexity

(09:35) Startup and AI costs

(12:14) The proper AI model

(14:47) Open vs Proprietary Source

(15:51) Is AI evolution saturated?

(17:07) How Perplexity uses AI

(18:49) Perplexity Engineering team

(21:48) Trials, teams and management

(28:17) Startup planning

(31:53) Team structure

(33:33) Developing procedures

(37:35) Perplexity's "secret sauce"

(40:31) Metrics in Perplexity

(44:38) Perplexity's future

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