Artificial intelligence-based search engine startup Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is an Indian-origin American, has said he was depressed when he failed to get admission in Computer Science at IIT Madras. Srinivas has a dual degree (B.Tech and M.Tech) in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras.
“I was disappointed I didn’t get computer science in IIT Madras. My friends who were training together with me for JEE (Joint Entrance Examination), all got into computer science. For one year, I was just depressed, and I mostly hung out with them,” he said in the Aarthi and Sriram podcast on You Tube hosted by venture capitalists Aarthi Ramamurthy and Sriram Krishnan.
Srinivas tried to make the switch to Computer Science from Electrical Engineering after the first semester, but fell short by a negligible percentage point.
“At the end of your first semester IIT gives you an option to change your branch if you get about a certain CGPA (Cumulative Grade Point Average), and I missed that by 0.01. I thought that was the end of the world. I was so mad at myself,” he said.
Srinivas’ despair turned out to be a blessing in disguise in the long run.
“I went into a whole shell. But that’s when I discovered a lot of these online lectures, online competitive programming sites. I wasn’t talking to anybody else, I was just like absorbing myself and learning all these things myself, trying to solve all these problems. I started coding a lot. As a kid, it was more out of like vengeance – ‘let me prove the world wrong I’m actually good at this’. All that helped me later,” he said.
In the process, Srinivas acquired programming language skills, especially Python, which somewhat placed him ahead of IIT students in Computer Science.
“I had a great background in Python way before other people at IIT because Python was still not a language that even my computer science friends focused on,” he said.
That’s when Srinivas picked up machine learning, a crucial element in the world of AI.
“I got a good hang of all these things machine learning people use. For no reason, I just learned it. I would just mostly keep learning. It helped me when I had a chance to take a machine learning class in my third year. That was actually run by the Computer Science department. And my professor at the time, he was like ‘I don’t usually let electrical people take this class. You guys are not going to do well. But maybe you can prove me wrong’. And I ended up topping the class,” he shared.
Srinivas was rewarded for his efforts when he got an internship with Canadian computer scientist and Turing Award winner Yoshua Bengio who recommended Srinivas for PhD in Computer Science.
“He [Bengio] wrote a letter for me for PhD admissions and I applied only to two schools – MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and Berkeley. MIT rejected me, Berkeley admitted me,” he said.
At the University of California, Berkeley, Srinivas met research scientist John Schulman who was working with Open AI.
“John Schulman, the guy who invented Chat GPT at Open AI, he was also from Berkeley. He noticed my work and he invited me to do an internship. So, that changed my life. I got into Open AI,” Srinivas said.
He recounted Elon Musk, an early investor at Open AI, exiting the company just around the time he had joined.
“For an intern in 2018, this was when [Elon] Musk was still there in Open AI. And I remember, Musk left Open AI around the time I joined. I was idolizing this guy. And then he calls at all hands and announces that he’s no longer going to be involved and swears at people left, right and centre and just leaves the room. It was a lot of drama,” Srinivas said.
Srinivas worked with Deep Mind and Google, between 2019 and 2021, after the internship with Open AI before returning to Sam Altman’s company in 2021. A year later, Srinivas decided to quit and became the co-founder CEO of Perplexity AI in August 2022. Perplexity AI, which has been making waves in the AI space in Silicon Valley, is currently valued well over $500 million with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos as one of the investors.