Perplexity has tapped into the power of generative artificial intelligence—with all its problematic tendencies—in an effort to challenge Google as the dominant way people find information online.

The AI search tool rose in prominence in 2024 and was lauded as a promising alternative to Googling. Like other AI players though, the service has been sued for alleged copyright infringement. It has been accused by Forbes of plagiarizing its news articles, closely paraphrasing other websites, and hallucinating incorrect information.

Despite the furor, Perplexity today says that its service gets 650 million queries per month and is said to be chasing investment that would value the company at $18 billion. The company is pushing AI assistants for mobile devices and working on its own web browser. In April, Motorola announced that Perplexity would come bundled with its new Razr Ultra phones. Last month the company partnered with PayPal to make it easier for users to buy products using its assistant. Samsung is also said to be in talks to possibly include Perplexity on its devices, according to a report from Bloomberg. (Perplexity declined to comment on this after the interview.).

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas spoke with Will Knight, senior writer at WIRED, by phone and email.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

WIRED: The PayPal deal seems important to the vision that everyone has for agents. Is ecommerce the killer “agentic” app?

Aravind Srinivas: Agents are the killer app for everything. Agents allow users to have the experience that’s best for them. Some people like shopping and researching, and some people want it done for them. There’s a spectrum in between, and our focus is what is the best experience for the user.

Speaking of the experience, agents still make mistakes. What happens when they buy something by accident?

Merchants and buyers have adapted to every new technology since ancient times. We just show both of them what is possible, and they choose. Every successful technology has had to take security and error-resolution very seriously, and that won’t change.

Integrating AI with personal devices is another big theme. Why does the Motorola deal matter to you?

It’s a big deal because Motorola is one of the largest phone brands in the world. This partnership gives us the ability to make trustworthy AI more accessible than ever. Now, by introducing Perplexity to millions of people around the world, in a native and seamless way, more people will get to see how much more really is possible with search.

Would you consider developing your own devices eventually?

We are focused on building the best AI assistant and answer engine.

Motorola will offer other AI assistants, so how will Perplexity distinguish itself?

As AI assistants become more common, accuracy and trust will become even more important. An assistant isn’t very useful if it’s unreliable. Worse, if an assistant is misleading or sycophantic, then it isn’t an assistant—it’s a manipulator. That’s not just useless, it’s dangerous. Inaccurate AI has a negative compounding effect, and we have always been the leader in developing AI and AI assistants focused on accuracy and verifiability. That will have a positive compounding effect.

Wait though … Perplexity—like other AI search engines—has been criticized for hallucinating and getting things wrong.

We welcome this criticism, because it’s the best way for us to continually improve. In reality, errors account for a small fraction of results, and our answers are far more accurate than 10 blue links polluted by decades of SEO-optimized content. [In response to a follow-up request, Perplexity did not provide further details on error rates, but Jesse Dwyer, a spokesman, said that reliability is improving constantly]. But the fact is, accuracy and trust will only become more important as AI integrates into more of our lives, so this is something we’re relentlessly focused on. We can’t get there without this feedback.

Perplexity also cribs from copyrighted news articles with its “discover” section. Do you understand why some publishers are upset?

We’ve answered that before. See our blog post on how we respect robots.txt [a file added to websites that specifies whether web crawlers should access their content].

The Perplexity assistant for Android and iOS seems “agentic” because it can take actions. How big of a shift is this?

AI is pretty good at answering questions now. What really needs to be done is get AI to take actions. People use the word “agents”; you can go with whatever you want—“agent” or “assistant”—but in the end, it needs to string together tools and execute actions. That’s why we’re [also building a] browser, and an assistant on iOS, Android.

Do Apple and Google have too much control over their mobile platforms compared to outsiders looking to build agents?

With iOS it’s particularly challenging, because you have to string together a bunch of event APIs. On iOS, Mail, Calendar, Reminders, Podcasts, all that stuff is natively available through the Apple SDK [software development kit used to build applications], so you can actually at least draft emails, schedule meetings, move meetings, set reminders, all this stuff, open podcasts pretty easily. You can do searches for podcasts … “get me the one where Mark Andreessen discusses de-banking with Joe Rogan.” It can get you that pretty quickly.

It’s mostly difficult because you cannot access other apps. iOS is not very different from Android, because AI cannot access most apps on Android either (meaning that the Perplexity assistant can interact with some apps more easily than others). [But] third-party apps can build their SDKs to be accessible on the Android SDK. For example, our Android system can display a song on Spotify. On iOS, you can only link to a specific Spotify song, and you have to manually start playing the audio.

Oh, so it’s app-makers that are holding AI agents back?

That’s the challenge. If people are offering us APIs—say, Open Table, Uber, DoorDash, or Instacart—where we can access information within the app without even having to open the app. On the back end, that’s pretty powerful. For example, if we can access information on Uber and find that Uber comfort doesn’t cost more than 5 or 10 percent of Uber X, then we can just book Uber comfort for you—if that’s a preference that you set on Perplexity.

Or similarly [we can] find the best Thai place near you and get me a dash [delivery] a lot faster than going to DoorDash app, searching for Thai food and scrolling through all these options, reading all those reviews and then putting your address, doing the checkout, all that stuff. We could honestly do all that in our system and just make the experience a lot more seamless and simple. I think that’s where things are headed, but people need to open up their apps to us, and we’ll have to see who’s willing to do what.

Isn’t the biggest problem that AI agents just aren’t very smart and useful yet?

My analogy [for AI agents] is that we are at a point where Perplexity was in 2022 [just before it took off]. It’s not like we got all the answers right, people made fun of hallucinations and some people call it “Google in macro seconds.” It was not quite there.

It only took off many months later, when models got better, and I expect the same trend with the agents and assistants. There’s going to be some set of things that really work, daily use cases, and there’ll be a long tail of things that don’t work, that we’re going to keep fixing over time.

But that’s exactly why we are building a [web] browser, because the browser front end will let you do the work on your own too, if you’re not happy with what the AI did. So, then we can learn from that and fix that over time. Waymo and Tesla self driving did not work for a long time. Now, people take them for granted. I think it is a similar trajectory for us.

Is this why you floated the idea of Perxplexity taking control of Chrome—if Google were forced to divest it?

We’re not saying we’re interested in buying Chrome. We’re saying that if there’s no other path, if Google is put in a situation where they have to divest Chrome, then we’d be open to running it. But Google should not have to divest Chrome, because Chrome and Chromium are tied to each other.

Chromium is an open source project that’s being run very [well] by Google, and it is the reason for Microsoft Edge and the Brave browser.

OpenAI has also shown an interest in taking control of Chrome.

Giving ownership of Chrome or Chromium to a company like OpenAI would be a disaster, because open source and OpenAI are an oxymoron at this point. [OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment. The company says it will release an open source AI model this summer.]

There are only two companies that can really potentially run Chrome: Microsoft and Meta. Honestly, Microsoft would spoil it, just like it spoiled Edge. And transferring Chrome to Meta is transferring Chrome from one monopoly to another. [The FTC has filed a lawsuit that accuses Meta of acting as a social networking monopoly; the company argues this is not the case.]

What do you expect agents to be useful for first?

I think [they will make] a lot of your personal searches a lot better.

Like asking, “What was the article I read last week about this one particular company?” or “Can you summarize my X feed for me so that I know what’s trending?” because you don’t want to go to X and get distracted by it. Or “Can you schedule this meeting for me with this person and if there’s a conflict send them an email asking for a different time?” All these boring things, I feel we will be able to automate [them] pretty quickly [in future].