Perplexity AI founder Aravind Srinivas credits OpenAI CEO Sam Altman with career advice that helped shape his approach to work: focus on things that come naturally to you but are difficult for others. Srinivas says his experience winning a Kaggle competition at IIT Madras, despite having limited machine-learning knowledge at the time, helped him recognise this strength. His journey through UC Berkeley, OpenAI, Google Brain and DeepMind eventually led to the launch of Perplexity in 2022.