Aravind Srinivas, the Indian-origin CEO of Perplexity AI, has revealed that he had interned with a startup in Bengaluru and the only reason they accepted him was because he had scored 10 out 10 GPA at IIT Madras.
Speaking to Moneycontrol, Srinivas said, "I did an internship in India in one startup in Bengaluru. They took me because I got a 10 out of 10 GPA in like my second year in IIT Madras and like that was pretty rare. So they just took me out of the promise."
He had a month to study artificial intelligence -- which was called machine learning around 2014 when Srinivas did his internship -- and it spiked his interest. "I watched Andrew NG and Geoffrey Hinton's lectures on Coursera and got really excited about all these topics," he said.
When Srinivas returned to IIT Madras, he was intent on learning more about it.
"I was in electrical engineering, so machine learning was a computer science topic. So I saw the professor in IIT-M, who was also one of the only professors in India at the time doing machine learning research," the CEO of Perplexity AI told Moneycontrol. "Professor Balaraman Ravindran. He's in IIT Madras. And he told me, take my class, and I don't think you guys would handle it. But if you can handle it, maybe you can continue."
Srinivas ended up being one of the top scorers in his class. "And I almost topped this class, like basically the top one or two, I believe. I forget exactly. And he really wanted to work with the top students who are doing research with them. So I continued, did a lot of research with him," he said.
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