The heads of two of the top AI companies in the world, OpenAI's Sam Altman and Perplexity AI's India-born CEO Aravind Srinivas, recently traded playful jibes and even congratulated each other on their technological developments.
The conversation began with the OpenAI CEO announcing a new update to ChatGPT which he claimed is "pretty good" and would soon get much better. "We put out an update to chatgpt (4o). It is pretty good. it is soon going to get much better, team is cooking," Altman shared on X. It prompted a response from Perplexity AI's Srinivas. “Sorry, what's the update?” he wrote, to which Altman replied: “Among many other things, it's the best search product on the web! Check it out and lmk what you think.”
Srinivas responded to it with: "Lol, I just mogged you yesterday, check this out." He was referring to a post about the launch of Deep Research for Perplexity. Altman took it lightheartedly and said he would not hold it against Srinivas as he had apologised to him in person for all the "mean tweets". “Since you nicely apologised to me in person for all the mean tweets last week, I'm going to let this go. Keep cooking out there! Proud of you.” Altman wrote.
Although, by its own admission, Perplexity AI falls behind ChatGPT's Deep Research in accuracy rankings, Srinivas claimed in a post that its new AI offerings are "an order of magnitude faster and cheaper" than the OpenAI tools.
OpenAI is known for ChatGPT, which helps users with everything from writing essays to coding and answering complex questions. On the other hand, Perplexity AI is a Google alternative but powered by AI. It focuses on searching for information, providing more accurate and reliable answers directly instead of just giving you a list of links (like Google).