Aravind Srinivas Age, Biography

Some Lesser Known Facts About Aravind Srinivas

• As a student, Aravind Srinivas won the National Talent Search (NTS) Scheme scholarship by the Government of India and the Kishore Vaigyanik Protsahan Yojana, a scholarship programme by the Department of Science and Technology.

• He received the merit award at the Indian National Mathematical Olympiad (INMO), overseen by the National Board for Higher Mathematics (NBHM).

• According to him, he was depressed when he was unable to secure admission in computer science and instead was admitted in Electrical Engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IITM), Chennai.

• He lost his chance to change his department after the first semester because his Cumulative Grade Point Average (CGPA) was 0.01 lower than the required.

• After these setbacks, he self-learned computer science topics including Python (a programming language) and Machine Learning (a branch of Artificial Intelligence) through online classes and several programming websites.

• He completed an internship with Yoshua Bengio, a Canadian computer scientist and ACM A M Turing Award (commonly known as the Nobel Prize of Computing). He also wrote the letter of recommendation for Arvind Srinivas’s PhD admission.

• While pursuing his PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, John Schulman, the inventor of ChatGPT, noticed his work, and gave him an internship with OpenAI in 2018.

• He worked as a Research Intern at DeepMind (2019) and Google (2020-2021).

• In 2021, he worked as a research scientist at Open AI for a year.

• In August 2022, he co-founded Perplexity AI, Inc. (known for its conversational search engine) with Johnny Ho, Denis Yarats, and Andy Konwinski. As of December 2024, he is the company’s Chief Executive Officer (CEO).

• Perplexity AI launched a shopping hub in November 2024, backed by Amazon and Nvidia. As of December 2024, the company raised $500 million in funding, increasing its valuation to $9 billion.

• Since 2023, he has worked as the angel investor of various software start-ups.

• In September 2024, he announced that he signed up for the game show Squid Game (Season 3).
  

  Aravind Srinivas with Lee Jung-jae of Squid Game

• According to him, the real issue that needs attention is the matter of illegal immigrants to the United States rather than the row over the issue of H-1B visas or Indian immigrants taking away American tech jobs.