Aravind Srinivas & Edwin Chen: The $1B Bootstrap, Apple's AI Edge, and Benchmarks | TWiAI E10

This week we sit down with Aravind Srinivas and Edwin Chen on This Week in AI Episode 10. Aravind is the co-founder and CEO of Perplexity, whose revenue has grown from $100M to $500M on the back of Perplexity Computer. Edwin is the co-founder and CEO of Surge AI, the data training company teaching frontier models how to think, which quietly bootstrapped past $1B in revenue without ever raising a dollar. This Week In AI is made possible by: PayPal Open - One Platform for all Business: http://paypalopen.com/ *Timestamps:* 00:00 Cold open 01:00 Welcome & intro to Aravind Srinivas and Edwin Chen 02:40 Why Perplexity Comet and Perplexity Max are taking off 05:25 Edwin on Surge AI and why "data labeling" is the wrong term 10:47 Tim Cook steps down — what Apple's new CEO should do 13:56 Owning your agent loops: why Apple wins 21:20 "The iPhone is not getting disrupted by AI at all" 23:09 $242B raised in Q1 2026 and the late-stage capital flood 23:55 Edwin on bootstrapping Surge past $1B without raising 25:09 The ChatGPT "one weird trick" story and clickbait models 30:58 Claude Code as a loss leader to dominate token collection 33:30 Are we in the endgame for coding? 35:35 Autocomplete to auto-diff to auto-outcomes 38:54 The death of the no-code movement 41:34 30% headcount growth, 5x revenue — the efficiency playbook 45:41 AI in Hollywood, Gal Gadot, and $70M movies that should cost $200M 50:29 "People don't buy models, they buy products" 57:20 Specialization vs commoditization — what actually accrues value 58:00 "LM Arena is a cancer on AI" 63:34 Perplexity's heuristics for measuring user intent 65:41 Model Council, Jensen Huang, and orchestrating frontier models 71:23 Most impressive AI experiences — WhisperFlow, Grok on X, Claude Design, and WHOOP 78:29 Hiring at Surge AI and Perplexity Subscribe to This Week in AI on Apple: https://thisweekinai.ai/apple Subscribe to This Week in AI on Spotify: https://thisweekinai.ai/spotify Follow Jason: X: @jason LinkedIn: /jasoncalacanis Follow Oliver: https://x.com/oliverkorzen *Check out all our partner offers:* https://partners.launch.co/ *Links Mentioned on the Show:* Perplexity: https://perplexity.ai/ Surge AI: https://surge.ai/ Perplexity Comet: https://comet.perplexity.ai/ Perplexity Max: https://perplexity.ai/max Claude Code: https://claude.com/product/claude-code Claude Design: https://claude.com/claude-design OpenAI Codex: https://openai.com/codex GitHub Copilot: https://github.com/features/copilot Cursor: https://cursor.com/ LM Arena: https://lmarena.ai/ Kimi K2: https://www.kimi.com/ DeepSeek: https://www.deepseek.com/ Apple Silicon: https://www.apple.com/mac/m4/ WhisperFlow: https://wisprflow.ai/ WHOOP: https://www.whoop.com/