Token economics and loss-leading models

This week we sat down with Aravind Srinivas and Edwin Chen. 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.

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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 value58:00 "LM Arena is a cancer on AI"

63:34 Perplexity's heuristics for measuring user intent65:41 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

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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/