Who is Aravind Srinivas, the Indian-origin AI CEO challenging Elon Musk over USAID funding?

Amid the USAID shutdown controversy, Aravind Srinivas, the Indian-origin CEO of Perplexity AI, has made a daring shot at Elon Musk, his Tesla counterpart.

“Considering raising $500B from USAID. Funding secured. @elonmusk, stop me if you can. What is USAID?" Srinivas posted on X.

Considering raising $500B from USAID. Funding secured. Stop me if you can @elonmusk

— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) February 5, 2025

The post was made just days after Musk and US President Donald Trump demanded that the federal agency be shut down .

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A federal judge halted the administration’s plans to place 2,200 USAID employees on paid leave on Friday.

Here’s all we know about him.

Who is Aravind Srinivas?

• Srinivas is the CEO and co-founder of Perplexity AI, a search engine driven by artificial intelligence and supported by well-known investors like Jeff Bezos.

• As per Business Today (BT), he was born in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, on June 7, 1994, and graduated from IIT Madras in 2017. He studied cutting-edge ideas like reinforcement learning and transfer learning there, which prepared the groundwork for his future work in artificial intelligence.

• Later, he migrated to the United States to do a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California, Berkeley. He gained prominence in academic circles for his work in fields like computer vision, contrastive learning, and the creation of images and films using transformer models.

• Following his studies, Srinivas joined OpenAI in 2018 to work on problems related to reinforcement learning. A year later, he was employed in London at DeepMind, where he worked on contrastive learning methods. He also worked at Google from 2020 to 2021, helping to develop state-of-the-art vision models like HaloNet and ResNet-RS.

• Srinivas rejoined OpenAI as a research scientist after receiving his PhD, NDTV reported. He was a member of the team that created DALL-E 2, a groundbreaking text-to-image generator that marked an enormous leap in generative AI.

• He co-founded Perplexity AI in August 2022 alongside Andy Konwinski, a co-founder of DataBricks, and Denis Yarats, a former Facebook AI scientist.

• Perplexity AI developed a chat-based search engine driven by AI that provides immediate replies to user inquiries. The platform seeks to improve the speed, dependability, and usability of information access by using modern techniques such as GPT-3.

• Besides that, he has been an angel investor since 2023, helping firms developing new artificial intelligence technologies, according to BT.

• Early in 2025, Srinivas and Perplexity AI grabbed headlines again with their bold plan to combine with ByteDance, TikTok’s parent business. A new holding company situated in the US, tentatively called “NewCo,” will be established as part of the plan to assume control of TikTok’s the US operations.

• According to the idea, following a $300 billion initial public offering (IPO), the federal government may acquire as much as 50 per cent of the new business. While current TikTok investors would own stock in NewCo, ByteDance would continue to have authority over the platform’s primary recommendation structure. This action appears as a bid to reduce national security worries about TikTok in the US.

How is Musk influencing the USAID shutdown?

Musk has recently been loudly critical of USAID .

He referred to the federal agency as a “criminal organisation” even before Trump announced plans to shut it down. After that, he intensified the efforts by calling it, “a crazy waste of your tax money!”

Trump also echoed, “USAID has been run by a bunch of radical lunatics, and we’re getting them out.”

With inputs from agencies