Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas has a message for young people: ditch the endless social media scrolling and start mastering artificial intelligence tools instead. Speaking in an interview with tech enthusiast Matthew Berman, Srinivas urged people to “spend less time doomscrolling on Instagram; spend more time using the AIs.”

The CEO warned that those who fail to adapt to AI technology will be left behind in the job market. “People who really are at the frontier of using AIs are going to be way more employable than people who are not,” Srinivas said. “That’s guaranteed to happen.”

“AI Testing the Limits”

Aravind Srinivas acknowledged that keeping pace with rapidly evolving AI technology poses significant challenges for most people. “The human race has never been extremely fast at adapting,” he said, noting that AI technology evolves every three to six months, testing “the limits in terms of how fast we can adapt.”

The Perplexity chief predicted that some workers will inevitably lose their jobs due to their inability to keep up with AI advances. However, he sees entrepreneurship as the solution to potential job displacement.

Driving New Job Creation

As AI reduces headcounts across industries, Aravind Srinivas believes new employment opportunities must come from entrepreneurs rather than traditional companies. “Either the other people who lose jobs end up starting companies themselves and make use of AIs, or they end up learning the AIs and contributing to new companies,” he explained.

His comments align with broader industry concerns about AI’s impact on employment. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei recently predicted AI could eliminate 50% of white-collar entry-level positions within five years, while AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton warned that artificial intelligence will replace workers in “mundane intellectual labor.” However, other tech leaders like Nvidia‘s Jensen Huang take a more optimistic view, suggesting AI will transform rather than eliminate jobs entirely.