Aravind Srinivas
Co-founder and CEO of Perplexity; first author of CURL and Bottleneck Transformers
- Cofounder and CEO, Perplexity13
Aravind Srinivas is the cofounder and CEO of Perplexity; NVIDIA's March 2026 announcement of the Nemotron Coalition quotes Srinivas under that title on Perplexity's plans to contribute to open frontier models. An AWS Startups article co-written by Perplexity co-founder Denis Yarats says Perplexity was founded in 2022 by Srinivas, Yarats, Johnny Ho and Andy Konwinski, and that Srinivas previously worked as an AI researcher at OpenAI. Srinivas earned a PhD in computer science at UC Berkeley in 2021 with a dissertation on representation learning for perception and control, advised by Pieter Abbeel. That research includes CURL, which applies contrastive learning to reinforcement learning from pixels, and Bottleneck Transformers (BoTNet), a self-attention backbone for computer vision, both with Srinivas as first author.124356
Work
CURL (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
First author, with Michael Laskin and Pieter Abbeel, of "CURL: Contrastive Unsupervised Representations for Reinforcement Learning" (2020); CURL is one of the articles presented in Srinivas's Berkeley dissertation.54
Bottleneck Transformers (BoTNet) (external site: arxiv.org)Published research
First author of "Bottleneck Transformers for Visual Recognition" (2021), which replaces the spatial convolutions in the final three bottleneck blocks of a ResNet with global self-attention; the paper is one of the articles presented in Srinivas's Berkeley dissertation.64
Other documented roles
Roles the sources document but that are not confirmed as current.
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