'Want to understand what you’re browsing’: Aravind Srinivas reveals why Perplexity wants its own browser

Perplexity AI had earlier this year announced its plans to launch a new browser to compete directly with the likes of Google Chrome and Safari. In a recent interaction, the AI startup's CEO Aravind Srinivas revealed that one of the reasons for Perplexity's move to a browser is to build a personalised profile of its users and potentially show them some ads in the future.

In an episode of the TBPN podcast, Srinivas said, "Instagram has shown some stats where the engagement time on the platform reduces if you remove the apps Because that's level personalization of the ants. So if any of the AI companies can do that I think that could be like a thing where brands could pay a lot more money To advertise there. So that's yet to be explored. But in order to crack that we need to crack memory properly that's kind of one of the other reasons we wanted to put a browser."

“We want to get data even outside the app to better understand you Because some of the prompts that people do in these as is purely work related it's not like that personal. On the other hand like what are things you're buying? Which hotels are going very which restaurants are you going to what are you spending time browsing? This is so much more about you that we plan to use all the context to build a better user profile And maybe you know through our discovery we could show some ads there.” Srinivas added.

Aravind Srinivas clarifies:

Soon after a clip of his podcast gained traction on social media and some media reports on the issue surfaced, Srinivas issued a clarification on the matter, writing on X (formerly Twitter),“The podcast hosts asked me a hypothetical question about how ads could play out in AI products including Perplexity. I laid out a scenario. The core point was first cracking memory and personalization if you do want relevant ads.”

“Memory and personalization are problems that absolutely need to be worked on whether you do ads or not, for a fully functional AI assistant. And every user will be given the option to not be part of the personalization (with zero ads even) if they don’t want it. It’s up to them to make a trade off between utility and privacy.” Srinivas added.