Perplexity CEO Reportedly Claims That Its Comet Browser Can Make Recruiters Go Extinct

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas reportedly said in an interview that in the future, the Comet browser can handle a recruiter's job easily. As per the report, the CEO highlighted that while the artificial intelligence (AI)-powered browser might not be able to do so at present, it can agentically handle a recruiter's week's worth of tasks with a single prompt. Notably, currently the Comet browser is available in beta to Perplexity's Max subscribers. The browser is available on Windows and macOS operating systems.

Perplexity CEO Reportedly Claims Its Browser Can Handle Recruitment Tasks

In a conversation with The Verge for the Decoder podcast, Srinivas explained the reason behind selecting Chromium as the foundation for the recently released Comet browser, the kind of tasks the browser can handle, and how the company is looking at the revenue model of its latest product.

Answering a question about the limitations of Comet, the Perplexity CEO reportedly explained that the browser might struggle with “long-horizon tasks,” which take 15 minutes or longer. Highlighting an example, he reportedly said that if one wants the browser to create a list of engineers who have studied at a specific university and worked at a specific company at some point in their career and port the data to Google Sheets, Comet might not be able to do it with a single prompt.

He reportedly added that doing that was still possible as long as the human user acts like the orchestrator “stitching them together.” However, the Comet browser might be able to do it all in under a year if reasoning models keep progressing at the same rate, he told the publication.

“I'm betting on the fact that in the right environment of a browser with access to all these tabs and tools, a sufficiently good reasoning model[..]could get us over the edge where all these things are suddenly possible and then a recruiter's work worth one week is just one prompt,” The Verge quoted him as saying.

Srinivas also explained the company's decision behind choosing Chromium as the building block for Comet, instead of developing the browser from scratch. He reportedly said that Chromium's back-end performance as an engine, security, and encryption are all great. Calling Google Chrome and the Chromium project “dominant,” the Perplexity CEO reportedly said that the company did not want to reinvent the wheel there.

Finally, on the revenue model, Srinivas hinted that in the future, if the AI agents within the browser become more reliable, the company might opt for a pay-per-use model, where they could charge users $20 (roughly Rs. 1,700) for a single task, instead of charging them $200 (roughly Rs. 17,300) for a monthly subscription.