Why Does Perplexity Build Its Brand on Curiosity?

Aravind Srinivas says Perplexity's brand is fundamentally to celebrate curiosity. He picked curiosity because he thinks it will be the only quality human beings can be proud of and lean into even more as AIs get better. He says you could argue that AI is the best accelerant of human curiosity, and almost the purpose of AI is to accelerate human curiosity.

Srinivas cites David Deutsch, the famous Oxford physicist, for the idea that human beings are the only species capable of being curious about what is already familiar. People might know something, look at it again, and think about it from a different perspective. Animals do not tend to do that. Srinivas says AIs can solve all the problems and answer whatever question there is, so the human role is to ask the next set of questions. People were designed to ask questions, but they grow up rewarded for answers. Now it is not necessarily cool to be a know-it-all, because an AI can answer everything. Nobody needs to find an expert to learn about a topic. People can go to the AI they trust for accurate answers.

The purpose, he says, is to lean into curiosity even more and not be afraid of asking questions, however dumb they are and however much of an outsider someone feels. People do not have to feel the bottleneck or fear of being judged. Perplexity's brand is built around that.