- Perplexity CEO suggests spending less time on social media and prioritise learning AI skills
- Aravind Srinivas warns that failing to embrace AI may risk falling behind in the job market tomorrow
- Srinivas says AI tools evolve rapidly, which requires workers to reskill every three to six months
Cut down the time you spend on social media and prioritise learning Artificial Intelligence (AI). This is the Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas' message to the youngsters. Those failing to embrace AI today may risk falling behind in the job market tomorrow, Mr Srinivas told tech YouTuber Matthew Berman.
"Spend less time doomscrolling on Instagram; spend more time using the AIs," he said. He added that being fluent in AI tools is rapidly becoming a key marker to getting jobs. "People who really are at the frontier of using AIs [systems] are going to be way more employable than people who are not. That's guaranteed to happen," he said.
He also acknowledged that the pace of technological change presents a serious challenge. With AI tools evolving every three to six months, Mr Srinivas said the pressure is mounting on workers to reskill constantly.
"Human race has never been extremely fast at adapting," he said, pointing out that current developments were "testing the limits in terms of how fast we can adapt."
While he expects that some jobs will inevitably be lost to automation, Mr Srinivas believes new opportunities can and must be created through entrepreneurship. "Either the other people who lose jobs end up starting companies themselves and make use of AIs, or they end up learning the AIs and contribute to new companies," he explained.
Earlier, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicted that 50 per cent of entry-level white-collar jobs could be eliminated within five years due to AI. AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton has also warned that artificial intelligence is poised to replace humans in "mundane intellectual labour."
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has suggested that AI will augment rather than eliminate jobs, transforming roles instead of erasing them.
Mr Srinivas also believes AI tools like Perplexity's Comet could soon take over recruiter roles. Speaking on The Verge's "Decoder" podcast earlier, he said, "A recruiter's work worth one week is just one prompt: sourcing and reach outs. And then you've got to do state tracking."
He added, "You want it to keep following up, keep a track of their responses... update the Google Sheets, mark the status as responded or in progress... sync with my Google calendar... schedule a chat, and then push me a brief ahead of the meeting. Some of these things should be proactive. It doesn't even have to be a prompt."
Currently, Comet is limited to paid users, but invitations for free users are being rolled out.
