On Dec. 7, 2022, seven days after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, a former OpenAI research scientist named Aravind Srinivas, who’d left the company just three months earlier, launched a competing A.I. chatbot called Perplexity. “Everybody was obsessed with ChatGPT. We were the only product that came and said, references and citations are important. So, from the beginning, we cared about it.” Srinivas, co-founder and CEO of Perplexity AI, said during an onstage interview at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference on Oct.