Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas credits Sam Altman’s advice – ‘pursue what comes easy to you but is hard for others’ – for his AI success. A brute-force win in an undergraduate data science contest, despite lacking formal training, solidified his natural aptitude. This intuition, rather than credentials, propelled him to co-found the $9 billion AI company.

Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas has revealed a piece of career advice he received from OpenAI‘s Sam Altman years ago—one that he says shaped his confidence in machine learning and, eventually, his path to building a billion-dollar AI company. In a podcast conversation that recently went viral on X, Srinivas recalled asking Altman a direct question: how do you figure out what you’re naturally good at?Altman’s answer was disarmingly simple—pursue whatever comes easy to you but seems hard to other people. It’s a heuristic that flips the usual “follow your passion” advice on its head, and Srinivas says it put words to something he’d already experienced firsthand.

A brute-force contest win that changed everything

Srinivas explained why that advice hit home by sharing a story from his undergraduate days at IIT Madras. A friend told him about a data science competition—similar to Kaggle—where the winner would land an internship. At the time, Srinivas had no formal training in machine learning. He didn’t know what Random Forests or Decision Trees meant.Instead of studying the theory, he took the scikit-learn library and brute-forced his way through it—trying different approaches until something stuck. His model ended up working on the hidden test data, and he won the contest.That moment, he said, gave him the confidence that machine learning was something he was naturally wired for—even before the field was widely called AI. “It was not even called AI at that time, it was called OCR or something,” he recalled.

From IIT Madras to a $9 billion AI company

Srinivas went on to complete a PhD at UC Berkeley, work at DeepMind, Google Brain, and OpenAI, before co-founding Perplexity AI in 2022. The company—an AI-powered answer engine that competes with Google Search—has since crossed a reported $9 billion valuation, making Srinivas one of India’s youngest billionaires at 31.His takeaway from Altman’s advice is straightforward—what feels intuitive or effortless to you can often signal a genuine strength. In a field moving as fast as AI, that instinct mattered more than credentials.