Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas has revealed a piece of career advice he once received from Sam Altman, a lesson he says played a key role in shaping his confidence in machine learning and ultimately his entrepreneurial journey.
Recounting the conversation, Srinivas said he directly asked the OpenAI chief what people should optimise for when choosing a career path. Altman’s answer, he said, was strikingly simple.
What Sam Altman told Aravind Srinivas?
“Pursue what comes easy to you,” Altman advised, calling it a reliable heuristic for identifying what a person is naturally good at.
Perplexity founder, Aravind Srinivas, shares the one piece of career advice from Sam Altman he never forgot: pic.twitter.com/KyK8KQXuGw— Big Brain AI (@realBigBrainAI) February 21, 2026
Srinivas explained that the advice resonated deeply because it mirrored an early experience from his undergraduate days, long before he became a prominent figure in the AI world.
At the time, one of his friends told him about a data science competition, similar to Kaggle, where the winner would receive an internship. Srinivas had no formal background in machine learning and barely understood the terminology involved. “I didn’t even know what any of these words meant,” he recalled.
With minimal knowledge, he relied on a simple approach. Using the Scikit-learn library, he built a basic algorithm to identify patterns and make predictions on hidden data. To his surprise, the model worked, and he ended up winning the competition.
That moment, Srinivas said, became a turning point. The ease with which he navigated the problem, despite lacking deep theoretical knowledge, gave him confidence that machine learning was something he was naturally wired for.
Altman’s advice, he reflected, put words to that experience years later: what feels intuitive or effortless can often signal a genuine strength.
The anecdote has struck a chord online. One user described Altman’s guidance as “simple but powerful,” adding that success often lies in finding the right gap or edge. Another noted that while many founders receive advice from successful entrepreneurs, it’s the ability to execute and adapt that advice to one’s own circumstances that truly separates the winners.
A third user summed it up humorously, calling it a “cheat code for talent spotting,” a line that resonated widely given Altman’s role in shaping the modern AI landscape.
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