Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas shares one career advice he got from Sam Altman that he wants everyone to follow
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.
