Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas shared career advice he received from OpenAI’s Sam Altman years ago. That, he says, shaped his confidence in machine learning and ultimately the path to building a billion-dollar AI company. During a recent podcast conversation on X, Srinivas recalled asking Altman a direct question.Altman’s answer was surprisingly simple. Pursue anything that seems easy to you but difficult to others. It’s a heuristic that turns the common advice of “follow your passion” on its head, and Srinivas says it puts into words what he’s already experienced first-hand.
Winning the round robin contest that changed everything
Talking about his undergraduate days at IIT Madras, Srinivas explained why that advice stuck with him. A friend told him about a data science competition similar to Kaggle. The winner was able to get an internship there. At the time, Srinivas had no formal training in machine learning. He didn’t know what random forests or decision trees meant.Instead of studying theory, he used the scikit-learn library and brute-forced his way through it, trying different approaches until something stuck. His model ended up processing hidden test data and won the competition.He said that moment gave him confidence that machine learning was something that came naturally to him, even before the field was widely referred to as AI. “Back then it wasn’t even called AI, it was called OCR or something,” he recalled.
From IIT Madras to $9 billion AI company
Srinivas earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, worked at DeepMind, Google Brain, OpenAI, and co-founded Perplexity AI in 2022. The company, an AI-powered answer engine that competes with Google search, has since been valued at over $9 billion, making him one of India’s youngest billionaires at the age of 31.The conclusion I draw from Altman’s advice is simple. What feels intuitive or effortless can often indicate genuine strength. In a rapidly changing field like AI, instincts mattered more than qualifications.
