Denis Yarats

Denis Yarats is a computer scientist and entrepreneur. He is best known as the co‑founder and Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Perplexity AI, an AI-powered search engine launched in 2022. Quotes So while I was a research scientist at Facebook AI Research, I was working on something called reinforcement learning mostly for like robotics, but that’s one of the sort of like essential piece for ChatGPT, like a relationship. And so Aravind and I were, happened to work on the very similar problems. And one day it was like middle of 2020 when COVID was just going on. We published independently, exactly the same paper, exactly the same research result. And since that point, we start talking and like collaborating together. I spent some time at Berkeley, working with him and his advisor. And after, after that, we were like maintaining our relationships. So he went on to open AI, um, and I was like, in early 2022 was about to like graduate and trying to see for like other opportunities. And we’ve been talking and it was becoming like, obviously clear that GPT is getting stronger and stronger. And there is going to be like an opportunity to create a company. And so we, around June 2022 decided to, he left OpenAI, I left Meta, so we decided to ,do something. In-Depth Feature: Perplexity CTO Denis Yarats Discusses AI-Driven Search It must be very interesting being at the center of a really big moment in the technology space and I think we can jump right into that. I think I want to first talk about what makes Perplexity different from any of the other platforms we see today. And what I really appreciate about using Perplexity, I'm a perplexity user myself, is that you can see the thoughtfulness put into making sure that any answer that is provided is truthful.There are citations, it's not biased. So maybe as someone who's overseeing the technology aspect of things and perplexity, what goes into making sure every answer I get when I type in a query on perplexity is as truthful and as relevant as possible. So we already and I, we come from academic background, so I think sort of citing when we write papers like citing stuff is very natural things for us. And when we started, we very quickly realized in this LLM world, this is going to be very essential component because, and especially in the time we're living right now, there's a lot of misinformation and very hard to trust what you read. So that's why this is probably one of the most fundamental aspects of our product and something we focus a lot on. In terms of technologies, it's definitely a very hard problem to solve. I think it requires a lot of coordination across multiple teams, multiple technologies and such. But more than anything, I think it has to be a mindset of the entire company. It's just basically if there's only few things we can focus on, this is going to be the very first thing that we're going to be focused on. Exploring the Future of AI with Denis Yarats, Co-Founder and CTO of Perplexity AI External links Category:living people