Hello, and welcome to Decoder! I’m Alex Heath, deputy editor at The Verge and author of the Command Line newsletter. I’m hosting our Thursday episodes while Nilay is out on parental leave.
Today, we’re talking about how AI is changing the way we use the web. If you’re like me, you’re probably already using apps like ChatGPT to search for things, but lately I’ve become very interested in the future of the web browser itself.
That brings me to my guest today: Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, who is betting that the browser is where more useful AI will get built. His company just released Comet, an AI web browser for Mac and Windows that’s still in an invite-only beta. I’ve been using it, and it’s very interesting.
Aravind isn’t alone here: OpenAI is working on its own web browser, and then there are other AI native web browsers out there like Dia. Google, meanwhile, may be forced to spin off Chrome if the US Department of Justice prevails in its big antitrust case. If that happens, it could provide an opening for startups like Perplexity to win market share and fundamentally change how people interact with the web.
In this conversation, Aravind and I also discussed Perplexity’s future, the AI talent wars, and why he thinks people will eventually pay thousands of dollars for a single AI prompt.
I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Alright, Aravind, before we get into Comet and how it works, I actually want to go back to our last conversation in April for my newsletter Command Line. We were talking about why you were doing this, and you told me at the time that the reason we’re doing the browser is, “It might be the best way to build agents.”
That idea has stuck with me since then, and I think it’s been validated by others and some other recent launches. But before we get into things, can you just expand on that idea: Why do you think the browser is actually the route to an AI agent?
Sure. What is an AI agent? Let’s start from there. A rough description of what people want out of an AI agent is something that can actually go and do stuff for you. It’s very vague, obviously, just like how an AI chatbot is vague by definition. People just want it to respond to anything. The same thing is true for agents. It should be able to carry out any workflow end to end, from instruction to actual completion of the task. Then you boil that down to what does it actually need to do it? It needs context. It needs to pull in context from your third-party apps. It needs to go and take actions on those third-party apps on your behalf.
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