Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lord's Podcast. I'm Joe Weisenthal and I'm Tracy Alloway. Today you are going to be, listening or watching a special episode of our podcast, recorded live at a conference which you've probably never seen before.

Yeah, this was at, the Lazard Forsquare Conference, and we interviewed Dmitry Shevelenko He is the chief business officer of Perplexity, which is something you might have used before. We certainly use it. Yep. One of the leading AI models.

This is a conference related to media and dealmaking. And so we talked about what is going to be the impact of AI on brands, on the news and on the internet as we know it.

So, take a listen. We also took questions from the audience. So you will hear us referring to questions that we are receiving on the app. We hope you enjoy. Take a listen. Sorry about the music people either love or hate the music.

Okay, so just a reminder, this is being recorded, so if you could keep it moderately quiet, you know, you can laugh, you can clap, do all of that, scream if you need to. Just don't rearrange the furniture and things like that.

And also reminder we're taking questions from the audience throughout this discussion. So if you send them on the app, we will see them and be able to ask Demetry and if we're looking at our phones, that's our excuse. Yeah. We're engaged in the question. We're engaged in the interview.

All right. So here's my first question. Should we even be talking to you? What I mean by that is I could just go on Perplexity and ask all these questions, and then we'll give me a pretty decent answer. What's the point?

So, first of all, thank you for having me. It's great to be here. The, the the I love that that tee up and you guys are scheming backstage of, like, what's going to be the heart opening question, but I love it because the thing that humans will always be uniquely exceptional at is asking questions.

So perplexity may have the answer, but perplexity does not have an innate desire to be curious. And that's what you guys have.

And that's why journalism is so important, and that's why having these conversations is important. It's about the questions, not necessarily the answers.

Kind of related to this, I guess. But here's the thing that I always think about, which is I'm, I enjoy using perplexity, etc.. Let's say, you know, you have great relationships with all the news publishers, etc. and the really cool thing, all and all those deals get solved, etc. like, why do we need the internet as we know it has web things called websites built for humans. Now that we're in this age where we can go to a, chat bot or something like it, and the answer is right there, do we need to have what are traditionally called websites anymore? Why would a publisher continue to invest in design and all of these things? When I could just get the answer from, perplexity or ChatGPT or whatever else?

So again, it goes back to I think the reason we're drawn to media properties is because of the questions that journalists and editors are asking. Right? It's it's not necessarily it's the framing. It is the what is actually worth asking about. What's worth reading about.

Yeah. Perplexity doesn't have answers to that. Okay. You have to come to perplexity already armed with a question.

And oftentimes people, you know, read news and there's something they didn't understand fully and they come to a perplexity to get that deeper understanding.

But the spark, that comes from editorial judgment, that comes from the intuition of a world class reporter.

And that's why we're excited through, you know, programs like comment plus, to, to find new business models for that.

How do you actually judge editorial judgment or quality of news sources? Because I can imagine a future where a lot of our news consumption is through something like a perplexity model, which means that you're basically the arbiter of what information is reliable. So how do you make those decisions?

It's it's not me at the, at the wheel. You know, ultimately this is where we focus, a big part of our technology. It's building accurate AI.

The thing that we believe is that's going to be most scarce in the future is not intelligence. It's trust. I think the bedrock of trust is transparency.

That's why perplexity pioneered, showing you exactly which source the information is coming from and empowering users to apply their own judgment of whether that is a good source or not so good source.

But we deploy many different algorithmic strategies. Oftentimes if many, publications are saying the same thing, you know, that's a strong signal that they're on to something.

So I think anyone could sort of intuitively understand why publishers might be anxious about perplexity as being a destination.

Evidently, it's not just news publishers. Literally. When since we got on the stage in a three minutes ago, news broke that Amazon demands perplexity to stop AI from stop AI agent from making purchases. It literally just broke three minutes ago from Bloomberg.

What is the. It's not just news that's anxious about the idea of perplexity being the destination. Clearly it's, all kinds of businesses.

So I think, and I haven't read the article yet, but I'm going to read it out. All right. I think I have an understanding of the issues. Yeah.

The, ultimately the issue with, with Amazon is tied to perplexities web browser called comment. And comment is a web browser that has an AI assistant built into it.

The first 30 years of the internet, we had lopsided AI where big tech, you know, Google, Netflix, Facebook, they used AI to control what we see, to get us to click on certain things and not click on other things.

And what is changing now is perplexity is focusing on giving powerful AI to the end user.

And we think this is the right thing to do. We think it's a principled viewpoint that when you're on Amazon, it's not Amazon's business. Whether you're using AI to help you evaluate, is this the best thing to buy? You know, can I find it cheaper somewhere else? Do I actually need to buy the other thing they're telling me to buy with it?

The world's wealthiest people, they have personal shoppers that help them do this. And we're democratizing that sort of intelligence, that sort of assistant access to everyone.

Just in terms of competition is the argument, basically, that technically, you know, a Google or an Amazon could create similar products to what you guys are doing, but their own business model basically prohibits them from doing what you're doing.

I should have you join our next investor pitch is exactly that.

You know, Google is still, you know, they're generating, you know, 100 billion, in revenue per quarter, which is amazing. But a lot of that is coming from getting, you know, adver. Yeah, their customers, advertisers,

you know, Amazon, they're trying to get you to buy as many things as possible.

Our success metric is the users. Are they willing to pay for a perplexity subscription? And so we're purely aligned with our users.

When speaking of competition, like what is the differentiator? Okay, maybe Amazon has some obvious, angles and some of the others. OpenAI seems sort of independent in the same bucket. It's really huge. It's one of the biggest websites in the in the world. It doesn't strike me. Many of the, things that they offer replicate seem sort of similar to perplexity. You must get this. I don't know, you know, private stock. Answer this. But what is the differentiator between you and, and, and OpenAI?

So, you know, I, I'm fortunate to get to speak with a lot of curious people that have to answer a lot of hard questions every day. And they're they tell me they use perplexity.

And it comes back to we're focused on accuracy above all else.

ChatGPT is an amazing product. But they built a product that is optimized for engagement. It's trying to be your cheerleader, your coach. It's trying to get you to to keep going.

And they've also built a product that is designed not to use the best, in service of your question, but it's designed to use their lives,

and so part of being neutral, part of being independent, trustworthy, accurate is using the best possible technology to answer the question in the best possible way.

And so being an aggregator of all the best models, having our own independent search infrastructure, that isn't the Bing search API, which is what, ChatGPT uses, those are all the building blocks of a more useful, accurate AI.

What's your actual revenue source at this point? Because I know you're big on subscriptions. You experimented with ads. I think you might have paused that at this point, but it does seem if you're trying to be different to Google, you probably don't want to be as ad driven as they are.

Yeah. So we're seeing tremendous traction with both consumer subscriptions and then companies buying the enterprise version of perplexity for their employees.

Ultimately, it's in that enterprise context where having accurate, useful knowledge is incredibly valuable.

And so, you know, we've had, you know, we've been fortunate with a enterprise go to market team of just five people. You know, seen that business, you know, more more than eight acts this year, seeing, you know, many multiples increase in our consumer subscriptions.

And we're excited about building products, that are user aligned, that also create marketing value for brands and advertisers.

But this isn't going to be rebuilding AdWords and click based systems.

We think it's important to create real value so that when your personal AI agent, powered by perplexity, is evaluating a potential commercial opportunity, it's something you might buy. Imagine, you know, alongside the answer, you got an offer for an exclusive discount that would be something that your agent would say, hey, this is even though this someone's paying for this to show up here. This is actually a good deal.

If it's just an ad that says click me, click me, click me, we don't think that's going to be sustainable. And that's not the type of marketing products we're looking to build.

Can we talk a little bit about the fundraising environment for I mean, obviously we know how crazy, you know, intense things are, are people throwing cash at you as you walk down the street? But also, it feels like every day, like, I like it used to be when I paid attention to startups, it felt like there were discrete rounds. There was a seed and then an A, and then a B and maybe a C and then an IPO. When I read, it feels like every day there is just it or the are the rounds blending into each other. So that is just the sort of ongoing stream of oh, here's a do raise, etc.. We got some new chips and then we are giving them some equity and so has the has the line between rounds. Is it blurring. Yeah.

So before perplexity I mean, I spent most of my career at consumer internet companies, but a stint as, a founder of a robotics startup and, I is definitely a different fundraising environment than that was, which was, very challenging.

I think at its core, a lot of investors believe in and we agree with this belief that, what's happening with AI now is as profound as the original introduction of the internet.

And so there are going to be a wave of new generational companies that are being built right now. And, you know, a lot of the value is actually, you know, compounding while these companies are privately held, and so that that is yeah, there's a lot of conviction, by, by private investors in that,

I think a second piece is that investors themselves are power users of products like perplexity.

They are people that have a lot of questions, do a lot of research. And so they have not just an abstract understanding of a balance sheet. They have their own intuition,

you know, which is very different than like B2B, SAS, where it's like, you know, you have to go do 30 customer interviews and you're kind of getting all the second order information,

you know, perplexity, use it yourself. You understand the value, the time that you just saved, the creative expansion you just had. And and that gives investors conviction.

And so that that is, you know, fueling this environment,

is that at times, you know, too frothy? Sure. You know, are there going to be some investors that, that make the wrong bets? Absolutely.

But the core human need of getting good answers to good questions, you know, we think that is boundless. And so we're, we're confident in the path ahead.

Well, speaking of froth, is there anyone you turn away in terms of being an investor?

Yeah. So there's this phenomenon, that that tends to happen in bubbly periods of, multilayered SVS. So SPV are special purpose vehicles.

And so you basically have many layers of outsource fundraising where you have, you know, principal agent misalignment, where the fundraiser is not making money off the investment, they're just making money off the management fee.

And so we often get approach, from players in that space. And we, you know, whenever we can detect that's what it is. We, we avoid taking on funds like that

because we want investors, who are getting direct access to perplexity and who are in it for the long haul, who aren't just trying to make a quick buck on on a management fee flip.

I want to talk about this more. I'm really fascinated. We actually we did an episode, with a vlog ten of the Robinhood CEO, and he was talking about tokenization of private assets. And I guess this sort of actually relates to the question about discreet rounds, but does it feel like, you know, in theory, if some sort of slice of equity in, perplexity, maybe people sell forwards or these vehicles that are linked to it, does it feel like the line between what it means to be a private and a public company is inevitably going to disappear, especially adding the fact that we seem to be on this road where public companies will not be expected or required to have to report information, as timely as they used to.

I think it's important, when you're a privately held company to control the sale of your equity.

And I think the challenge, you know, why I we haven't. Yeah. We've been approached by a lot of these tokenization schemes. And, you know, again, if you have folks on your cap table that are not aligned for the long term. Yeah, they may be looking for quick flips.

And then that creates a weird signal in the market. And that may harm, you know, a primary race. Right.

And so the the noise that comes with that liquid, it's not like we're short on other, you know, investment, you know, avenues, so it's just an unnecessary kind of noise risk.

So, speaking of throwing money around the $35 billion bid for Chrome was. What was that? Was that a troll?

We that was when we made that bid. The DOJ had still not decided, whether Chrome would be divested, from Google, the web browser,

as evidenced by, you know, Amazon's, behavior is clearly incredibly valuable surface area,

and that, you know, 35 billion was the starting bid. You know, like, at this point, I can safely say I think Chrome is worth more than that.

But what I can, confidently say is we had more than 35 billion of investor interest in making that bid. So it was not a, constraint on, you know, the funding side.

Obviously, Google does not want to sell Chrome unless they will be forced to, and it doesn't look like the government will be forcing them.

So you're serious about that one? It's not just a sort of antitrust flag waving exercise. No.

We had, you know, very large sovereign wealth funds that, you know, we're we're kind of lined up and ready to go.

Here's a great question from, someone anonymous via the app. Can you talk about unit margins? I you often hear this and it's like, oh, these AI companies, they're not even on a unit basis making money given the compute costs, etc., are what can you talk about gross margins. And right now, whether like, you know, a given query is profitable given the cost of delivering,

so the, a paying pro subscriber to perplexity is profitable for us. Okay.

So the unit margins are strong.

The, you know, free users right now because we do not monetize them. Sure. You know, we don't, you know, we lose money on those,

AI companies. I think something that is underappreciated, they generally actually, when they do that counting of free users, they attribute that to research and development, because you're still using those prompts to improve and train your system model.

Are all pro users profitable? Because this also strikes me as something unique with AI, which is that, you know, when back when Twitter was in its infancy, power users were good. It feels like in the case with AI, sometimes you get these power users where you're losing money on them. Are all pro users profitable, or do some use it so much that it's more than the subscription fee?

I mean, I don't it's not a material amount, and we've also introduced a max tier.

So we have a $20 a month Pro subscription. And for the folks that want, you know, the most expensive reasoning models and higher limits on them, there's a $200 a month product called Max. And then it also gets you access to our email assistant.

And so I think you'll, you know, and other companies have also introduced kind of higher tiers of subscription. So this is not a problem that's unique necessarily to AI. And and you kind of introduce tiers of service to to support it at scale.

What is your expenditure actually look like at this point. Like what are you spending the most money on? Is it we read about these insane salaries for engineers going to cloud or OpenAI or whatever. Is it talent retention or is it compute power? Is it the content deals with media organization. What are you spending on?

So the biggest expense is inference, right. So it is the cost of compute. When you're you're asking a question and running, it through a, oh, you know, that that is, that is a material expenditure.

We, you know, perplexity doesn't do pre-training. So the sorts of AI PhDs that other companies are, you know, paying, you know, reported, hundreds of millions of for, we're not that that's not we're not in the market for that.

We have incredible AI application engineers and that's that's what we recruit for.

Ultimately, engineers that are joining perplexity are joining because they believe we're just getting started. Right. And they're coming for an equity appreciation story. That's, you know, already bearing fruit. But we're just at the beginning of that journey.

Maybe this is sort of a way of restating Tracy's question, but it all doesn't feel like any, any AI conversation. It's like, what is the bottleneck, right? Yeah, right. Is it talent? Is it capital? Is it compute? Is it power, etc.? Like if you could have unlimited amounts of any one of those things, what would you want more of right now?

So I think it's important to bifurcate. There is the companies that do the training of foundation models. And those are the ones that are really pushing for the massive infrastructure build out. Yeah.

We're not constrained on compute for inference, at the current usage levels,

but as you know, behavior shift, I mean, by a show of hands in the room, like how many people have stopped primarily using Google when they have an informational question? So, you know, about what 80% of the room, you know, raise their hands and we see the early adopter behavior in you know, audiences like this, you know, folks that work in financial services, people that, again, for for whom quickly getting high quality information matters as you know, this behavior becomes more mainstream. We obviously will need more compute for inference.

But the the folks that are kind of talking about trillions of dollars in investment, it's really a different universe than ours.

I it's unclear to me why some of those investments are needed. Sometimes it feels like a strategy of, you know, kind of what what the US was trying to do with the Soviet Union of just getting your competitors to, go broke, by, you know, being able to raise the most capital. And we'll see how that plays out.

Since you mentioned financial services, we have a good question from the audience. We've done some media navel gazing. I'm sure we're going to do some more, but for now, financial services, navel gazing. What do you think the impact of AI will be on places like Lazard and other Wall Street firms?

I just think this is going to be a incredible flowering of creativity and productivity lift.

I think of using a product like perplexity and other AI tools in the day to day of somebody that works on an investment bank is really twofold.

The first is saving you 80% of the time, to get to that 80% first draft of a work product. Right.

And investment banks, that's kind of putting together pitch decks. Doing modeling, just gaining tremendous efficiency.

And it's not it's important to distinguish it's not about making that workflow autonomous. You still absolutely need human judgment on, you know, what the end output should be, how to approach it. This is this is not about replacing investment bankers. It's about giving them tremendous leverage.

I think the more disruptive impact is now that it got a lot easier to begin a new initiative, to begin a new prospect, how many more new engagements are you going to be able to spin up? Right.

Because the biggest constraint on new business is an employee feeling they have the bandwidth to take it on. And and, you know, experience leaders now have much more leverage. And I think that's going to play a profound role at Lazard. And you know, part of why I'm excited to be part of the organization,

I love these audience questions because they're, saying things that I would think that reminded me and that I would have been rude to say.

You didn't answer the first question about, are you going to kill journalism? But someone says you didn't answer the first question, how would journalism survive?

When I had skin that I get, oh yeah, you know, I isn't interested in asking questions, but that's not the question is like, why would brands continue to, like, build out these presents for like a human reading and scrolling when I can just go to one destination that doesn't necessarily click me anywhere else?

Well, I mean, when I look at the earnings numbers for the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, for Bloomberg media companies seem to be doing fine. New York Times is doing well. So games and I don't know if you get earnings numbers for. But what I, what I hear. Yeah like some subscription numbers.

But by the way yeah I was doing a lot more than games. I actually didn't know there. It's a very impressive company. But by and large I it does not look like the actual news business. It's a lifestyle company is doing particularly well. But I think it's it's part of the value of the bundle. I mean, it's, I mean, this is a very this is very analogous to when the internet was first introduced.

You had traditional brick and mortar retailers and the best brick and mortar retailers adapted to the digital environment. And the best publishers are adapting and gaining leverage. With

I mean, last night we had, the CEO, of Axel Springer, talk about how he's leaning into AI, and it's actually an incredible opportunity for productivity.

And so I, I don't think this is zero sum. I do think there's going to be some publishers that thrive and others, and the media business is already facing challenges, you know, certain segments of it. Well, before I, so I don't see this as being kind of the fundamental tension.

But if you fast forward 5 or 10 years from now, what is the front page of the internet actually will look like to you? And what exactly is I? I guess the economic pact between media and platforms such as yourself. What would the ideal pact or agreement actually look like? Like how? Basically, give me your vision of the internet in five years,

we, we're introducing something called Comet Plus, which, we already have the Washington Post and Condé Nast, LA times, many great publishers signed on for.

And it was really inspired by Apple News Plus,

where if you are a Comet Plus subscriber, which is $5 a month, and we bundled into perplexity Pro so even people that didn't necessarily, you know, want to pay for it. We're taking money out of our, cut and feeding it into this program to see it. As you consume premium content in the comet browser, we're then sharing that revenue back proportionately with publishers,

and it's actually accounting for not just page views of premium content, but agent actions on that content and citations in the comet browser.

And so ultimately, I think subscriptions are a very powerful business model for media. I think there's a lot more to do there. And we want to play a leading role in doing that.

I'm very impressed by the, the finance, module within perplexity. You know, there's a whole graveyard of companies that have tried to take down our, our employer and, at Bloomberg.

Do you see yourself as a potential challenger company? Tracy asked about, you know, financial services, etc.. Do you see yourself at some point down the road as a challenger to the terminal? Yeah.

I mean, how many people have access to Bloomberg Terminal? It's like, I mean, you guys like, it's not it's not millions, right? So yeah, it's not millions.

So for for us the success of Perplexity Finance is it's similar to what I was saying about with Amazon and people that have personal shoppers like Bloomberg Terminal.

Is that like it's this is like we know it's very lucrative is hiring a company.

And so when you're thinking about the lazards of the world and all the other banks, could you at some point see yourself pitching perplexity or perplexity terminal as a where all these other ones had failed to do it?

I think for us, the bigger picture, the bigger opportunity is not to go after Bloomberg Terminal.

It's giving everyone who can't afford Bloomberg Terminal a version of it that is useful for them.

And when they're making retail stock investment decisions, when they're understanding the interplay of the markets and the news cycle, that they have access to powerful technology. Right.

So it's not I don't think we can't like Bloomberg Terminal. Like people are there for the chatting. Like there's all kinds of features there that we're not trying to replace.

Thank you. And it's an amazing product and, amazing brand.

I think it's for us, this is about democratizing and expanding the scope of who has access to premium financial intelligence.

Another question from the audience. This one's from Olivier. Olivia on, what do you think will be the key skill sets for media entertainment executives to manage the impact of AI on content industries?

I mean, I think, my answer to this is the answer. I think it's a key skill set for any professional in the age of AI is you have to get really good at asking the right questions.

And so that means asking your teams, why are they working on what they're working on, what's the leverage? What's the unique differentiation.

And so is approaching their business with a profound curiosity, and an understanding that, you know, there are new disruption and leverage opportunities and to kind of lead with that curiosity.

Everyone always says that. But what does a good prompt actually look like to you? Can you give us a specific example of like a prompt that really impressed you?

I think to me, asking you a good question is like a level deeper than like the prompt engineering is, is kind of that that in some ways will get abstracted very soon.

When I say asking good question, it means a question that embodies and embeds all the known knowledge on a given topic.

And the question you're asking is then, you know, where do you push the frontier? Like what is what is the the thing that is not yet knowable, that in your question you're pushing your organization on,

you know, going back to, the browser question about the bid for Chrome, Google itself earlier this year,

there are a lot of people like, oh, Google is going to get disrupted by AI. And it's a classic innovator's dilemma. They invented all this tech and they're not making.

Now the stock market views Google's done phenomenally or alphabet. They've done phenomenally well. And a lot of people have really changed their tune on them.

If the browser is such an important part of the real estate here, does that just give them a massive leg up? I mean, I know you're going to have your own and OpenAI is going to have its own, but Chrome is everywhere. Like how that sounds like a very big Mo.

It's a very powerful distribution leverage point.

But their greatest strength is is also a weakness in that they built it around a AdWords system where they're reliant on people clicking on links.

And the behavior of clicking on promoted links will just matter less in the future of the internet than it has in the past.

Speaking of promoted links is another question I've been wondering about. Sometimes I see these companies and they advertise on LinkedIn, and they offer what I think is sort of would be the equivalent of like the AI equivalent of SEO. Is that all snake oil is there, like whatever is, does that exist? Can are there these games that publishers or any brands can play to do well in AI, or is that sort of a fraud?

I don't want to call it a fraud. I have not, uncovered, those companies provide analytics, but they're not actionable. Okay.

And so I have not found an actionable output there.

And in some ways, our purpose is to prevent those insights from being actionable.

Because if you can game a perplexity answer, it means is not accurate and trustworthy.

And so, you know, if they do find a hack, like we have better engineers that will, fill that hack,

I have a slightly philosophical question, but is there any way to inject a tiny bit of randomness or creativity in some of, perplexity output?

And what I mean by that is, I think at this point, we're all aware of, algorithmic content, moderation. And the idea that if you start your Netflix account and you watch one romantic comedy for the rest of your life, Netflix is going to be throwing like Matthew McConaughey films at you forever and ever and ever. How do you deal with that aspect of it? The risk that people are funneled into, like one particular answer stream or one quarter of the internet.

So memory will be an important feature of products like perplexity.

And the way we avoid that trap is transparency, just like we do with sources, where we actually show you all of the things that we've added to your memory.

And if you don't want to be pigeonholed as a romantic comedy lover, you just delete that memory.

And I mean, I, I'm kind of, I recently got into health supplements, and now every time I ask about health supplements, my decision to begin, you know, pomegranate supplements is getting mentioned. The answer and, yeah.

And I, Yeah, I deleted that because I'm like, you know what? I don't want to, like coming back to the pomegranates. As great as they are, and that was, you know, that that I just went and deleted that memory. I saw where it was. And, you know, I'm pomegranate free in my answers.

There's a question here about, let's see the comparison to the first wave of the internet. So this person is talking about content creation, AI agent Studios, pace of change, moving very fast. I mean, is decision. What's really extraordinary to me about the last several years is the speed with which we seem to get new paradigms right.

Blogs were one or going to be a big deal. That was 20 years ago. They had a life span of a few years then, you know, social media, Twitter, etc. there's been how do you think about, things get, overturned so fast these days? How do you think about making investment decisions under such conditions of uncertainty?

Yeah. This is, I mean, a funny time to to drop his name, but this is where we love the Jeff Bezos line of, you know, it's the hard thing to predict is not what's going to change, but what's going to remain the same.

I think from our vantage point, the bedrock is accuracy and trust. Right.

And that's actually as intelligence gets much more powerful. It's gets more powerful manipulating us. And so that's why kind of that trust bedrock, is paramount.

That said, one of my, you know, management, mantras is that I have absolute conviction that six months from now, I'm going to have a top three priority, that today I don't know what it is.

And that embedded in that is an understanding that even the model makers themselves, when they release a new model until it's out, they don't know what emergent capabilities and what the useful applications of that will be. Yeah.

And so kind of, you know, having core foundational principles while at the same time preserving agility and adaptability and being the best at applying the new gifts we get, for the service of users that that's going to be a key operating skill.

There's a second part of that audience question that Joe just asked. And I think it's it's probably the one that's on all of our minds, and it's the bluntest one. But is is I in a bubble?

There are certainly parts of it that that are not you obviously your competitors, presumably. Right.

I mean, I think of all of the time and leverage that professionals and knowledge workers are getting and I, I to me the ROI on that like I can see the trillions of dollars and economic productivity happening from it.

But are there certain companies that have just raised too much capital and is going to create, imbalances in the ecosystem? Yes. All right.

But we only have 45 seconds. My issue is a lot of things still don't work.

And I, I tried to ask. ChatGPT. Yesterday how many full school weeks there are in New York City public schools? And it's like, oh, I'd have to count it by hand and do it. Seriously said that it puts a screenshot of it.

A lot of these agent things, like they don't work very well. Like much like a lot of things I want to ask, who are the most common guests on our blogs over the years? It just gave me a bunch. This was like, this is not your site, but I'm just saying, like a lot of AI agents and so forth, they sort of crap out halfway through.

Yeah, I'm tempted to do a live check of other products that will give you a good answer on that. But, the,

This goes back to what I was saying about emergent capabilities,

the fail case, and this comes up actually in many enterprise conversations, is just because you tried something two months ago. Yeah. It doesn't mean it didn't work. It doesn't mean it's not working today.

And so we all need to keep this open mind that these technologies are getting smarter and better, at a rapid clip.

And, you know, those are solvable problems.

All right, Dmitry thank you so much for that. Thank you. Thanks, everyone. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. That was our conversation with Dmitry Shevelenko of Perplexity. Shall we leave it there? Let's leave it there. All right. This has been another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Tracy Alloway. You can follow me at Tracy Alloway and I'm Joe Weisenthal. You can follow me at the stalwart. Follow our guest, Dmitry Shevelenko He's at Dmitry140. Follow our producers, Carmen Rodriguez and Cale Brooks And for Odd Lots content, you can find our daily newsletter that is over at https://www.bloomberg.com/oddlots and you can join fellow listeners in conversation on our discord discord.gg/oddlots And if you enjoyed the conversation then please like this video. Leave a comment or better yet, subscribe! Thanks for watching.