What do you do when Big Tech copies your big idea? According to Perplexity CEO Arvind Srinivas, you prepare for it and keep construction anyway.
Speaking at Y Combinator’s AI Startup School, Srinivas gave clear advice in room filled with young students, entrepreneurs and future founders. He told him that today’s fast book AI in the AI world, if your product is good, is a high probability that a major company will copy it. He said, “They are anything good,” he said, “you have found to live with that fear.”

Perplexity, a startup known for the manufacture of a real -time AI answer engine, is an example in itself. When the company launched its web-clawing chatbot at the end of 2022, it stood in a market where most of the equipment was completely stable, old training data. Month later, technical giants such as Google, Openai and Anthropic launched similar features.

Srinivas said that big companies are under pressure to justify their large -scale investment and infrastructure costs. “They increase tens of billions … and need to find new ways to make money,” he said. “If your company can make billions in hundreds of millions or even revenue, expect a model to copy the company.”

Last week, Perplexity launched the comate, an AI browser designed to act as a digital assistant that understands the context, answers questions in websites, and then completes the moving tasks.

However, Srinivas’s final advice for interested builders was simple, but was sharp: worked incredibly, be ahead with innovation, and accept that the competition is part of the game. “You have to live with that fear,” he repeated, reminded the young founders that the pressure from Big Tech is almost indispensable, but not unbeatable.

In a separate interview earlier this year at Raj Shamani’s podcast, Srinivas focused his attention to India, where there is a growing user base of Perplexity, and offered a clear call for action for developers, freelancers and technical entrepreneurs in the country. He admitted that Indian AI is one of the fastest adopters in the world, but warned that the use alone would not make India a global leader in the region. “I hope that usage is beyond identifying just cheating code to work faster,” he said. “Side out gigs, earn more, increase the throw and if enough people start doing so, the average income increases, and the GDP goes up.”

However, his deep point was about ambition. Srinivas encouraged Indian developers to manufacture AI-first products that are not yet present, not just the workflow adaptation or the construction of clone. “Can you create something that is not present yet and can get it in the hands of 100 million people. Here or globally we create a new market cap, provide employment to people, and raise income from scratches.”

He pointed to three regions, where India has a real shot in creating an impact: healthcare, software development and financial counseling. In each of these, they believe that AI tools can supercharge individuals, such as never before, by helping doctors to explain diagnosis, to provide advanced code-hypothesis tools to small software firms, to provide reserved financial insight to the elite once.

But he also gave a warning: industries manufactured on recurrence, such as call centers and Dev shops churn the template work, are at lending time. “Voice agents are improving rapidly,” he said. “Whoever is driving those businesses, someone else should interrupt them before doing it.”