Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas delivered a commencement speech at University of California, Berkeley for their winter commencement. He reminisced about it via a LinkedIn post which said: “As the Spring commencement season kicks off, I’ve been thinking about the speech because it was so fun to write, and to think about my serious advice to graduates in the age of AI,” he said.
In the speech, Srinivas touched upon the technological shift that came with the advent of AI. “Whenever we witness a major technological shift that reshapes our world, a lot of people are going to pop up to tell you what they THINK is going to happen. I would like to urge you to remember: they don’t know what they’re talking about. No one does, not even me. Because it’s the future, and when it comes to the future, everyone is just like all of us here today. Everyone is on Day 1. The only difference is that all of YOU are the ones who are going to build the future,” he said.
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Srinivas then went on to ask the audience “Who cares what you do next?” and reiterated that what matters is “that you do it with great velocity.”
He also urged the audience to “never stop learning.” “You have to compound what you know. You must learn with an interest rate greater than the inflation rate of knowledge,” he said.
He urged students to “move fast” but also to “think slow.”
“Whatever you’re waiting for is in the future, no matter how fast you move on the way there. You can’t change the speed of time. The only thing you can change is what you find when you get there,” Srinivas said.
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The CEO also told the audience that their ability to ask questions would be “THE defining skill of your life.”
“Graduates, I encourage you to BE relentlessly curious. Ask questions of everything. Because this entire time you’ve been here at Berkeley, having the answer has never been the actual point of your education. The point was to give you more questions,” he said.
Srinivas was recently featured in Forbes’ list of India’s youngest billionaires. His company, Perplexity in fiscal year 2025-26 expanded beyond AI search into agentic productivity with Perplexity Computer—an advanced autonomous AI system designed to browse the web, code, use apps and execute complex multi-step tasks.