Mikhail Parakhin, the former head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising at Microsoft, has announced he is now on the advisory board for Perplexity. Perplexity is a new AI search start up, which technically would be in competition with Microsoft's Bing Search and Copilot.
Mikhail Parakhin from on X, "I’m joining the advisory board for Perplexity. Aravind Srinivas and Denis Yarats and team have built a great product, I'm excited to help them innovate faster." "Fun fact: I hired Denis 13 years ago as an IC engineer, now look at him," he added.
In other news: I’m joining the advisory board for @perplexity_ai. @aravsrinivas, @denisyarats, and team have built a great product, I'm excited to help them innovate faster. Fun fact: I hired Denis 13 years ago as an IC engineer, now look at him :-)
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) May 16, 2024
Aravind Srinivas, the CEO of Perplexity, posted on X, "Excited to share that we have three new advisors joining Perplexity to help us across search, mobile, and distribution: Emil Michael, former CBO of Uber, Rich Miner, cofounder of Android, advisor to Google, and Mikhail Parakhin, the former CEO of Bing, who launched Bing Chat and Microsoft Copilot."
He added that Parakhin "is the world's leading technical expert on search infrastructure and integrating it with LLMs. He has been at the forefront of AI and search, and his expertise will enable us to evolve our core answer engine, build in-house search infrastructure, anticipate new and unexpected challenges, and integrate new AI capabilities."
@emilmichael set the foundation for Uber’s $137B market cap, leading the introduction of offerings like Eats and Uber for business. He knows how to play to both consumer and enterprise strengths, and he’ll guide our growth, business, and distribution strategies.
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) May 16, 2024
And @MParakhin is the world's leading technical expert on search infrastructure and integrating it with LLMs. He has been at the forefront of AI and search, and his expertise will enable us to evolve our core answer engine, build in-house search infrastructure, anticipate new…
— Aravind Srinivas (@AravSrinivas) May 16, 2024
Bloomberg wrote, "“We've been fortunate to scale up so much in such a short period of time. The next step for us is to really think hard about strategy, both in terms of search, how to build our own index and how to scale it up to even more users,” Aravind Srinivas, the company’s co-founder and chief executive officer, said in an interview on Bloomberg Technology.
Parakhin will help Perplexity by advising on how to shape its search engine, among other topics, the company said.
It sounds to me that Parakhin likely left Microsoft in order to become an advisor to a company that competes with Microsoft? I mean, we know Parakhin is no longer leading up Copilot and Bing at Microsoft. This came after he stepped down as the head of Bing Search and Microsoft Advertising weeks ago after Microsoft hired Mustafa Suleyman as the CEO of AI at Microsoft.
I asked Parakhin if he left Microsoft but he did not respond by the time this article was published.
Forum discussion at X.
Update on May 23rd: Mikhail said on X he has no influence on Bing:
Nope :-(
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) May 23, 2024
