Perplexity received 780 million queries last month, CEO says

PerTlexity received 780 million questions in May, CEO Aravind Srinivas shared it on stage Bloomberg’s Tech Summit On Thursday. Srinivas said that the AI ​​search engine is more than 20% growing month.

“Give it a year, we will ask a billion a week if we can maintain this growth,” said Srinivas. “And that is pretty impressive, because the first day in 2022 we asked 3000 questions, just one day. So from there to 30 million questions a day now, it has been phenomenal growth.”

Srinivas also noted that the same growth process is possible, especially with the new comet browser where it works.

“When people are in the browser, it’s infinite retention,” he said. “Everything in the search bar, everything on the new Tab page, everything you put on the sidecar, one of the pages in which you are, these will all be extra questions per active user, and the search for new users who are just tired of Legacy browsers, such as Chrome. I think that will be the way to grow in the coming year.”

Srinivas said that the reason that Perplexity is the development of Comet is to shift the role of AI from simply giving answers to actually completing actions on your behalf. He explained that when you get an AI-driven answer, it is essentially four or five searches in one. On the other hand, AI would perform an action, be a whole browsing session with one prompt.

“You really have to have a browser and be able to hybridize the count on the client and the server side in the most seamless way,” he said. “And that requires reconsidering the entire browser.”

He further explained that perplexity did not consider Comet as ‘another browser’, but as a ‘cognitive operating system’.

“It will be there every time, always, for work or life, if a system is on the side, or like, just to do sessions for you,” said Srinivas. “And I think this will make us fundamentally reconsider how we even think about the internet. Like, we would earn earlier on the internet, but now people are increasingly living on the internet. As many of our lives exists there actually. And if you want to build a proactive, personalized AI, it has to live with you, and that is why we want the browser to be enthusiastic.”

Although the company did not reveal too much about the browser, Srinivas said in April that one reason why PerTlexity is developing his own browser is to follow user activities outside of his own app, so that it could sell premium advertisements, which would essentially reflect what Google did quietly around the gigantic today.

It is currently unknown when exactly Comet will launch, but Srinivas said earlier on X That it will launch in the coming weeks.