'AI companies were founded by white Europeans': Indian-origin co-founder shuts down author's remark with just 1 emoji

An author got community-noted on X after he claimed that Indians had not started any AI companies. An Indian cofounder reacted to the post.

Amid ongoing debates over reforms to the H-1B visa programme, an inflammatory remark about Indians and AI has caught the attention of Perplexity AI cofounder Aravind Srinivas. He reacted to a post where a man claimed that all the AI companies of “note” are founded by “white Europeans.” Further adding that “Indians can manage” an AI company but never start one.

A man claiming that only “white Europeans” and not Indians can be founders of AI companies has sparked outrage on social media. (Unsplash/Aidin Geranrekab)

The viral X post quickly got community-noted, with people pointing out that the claim was “factually incorrect.” It also mentioned Aravind Srinivas.

What did the community note say:

“Perplexity was founded by Aravind Srinivas an Indian. It has a valuation of $8B+ and 15M+ users. Abridge was founded by Dr. Shiv Rao an Indian American. The company has a valuation of $2.5B and serves 10k clinicians.”

How did Aravind Srinivas react?

The Indian techie re-shared the post and used a single emoji to express his reaction. He shared the Face with Monocle emoticon. According to Emojipedia, the “yellow face with furrowed eyebrows wearing a monocle” shows that someone is “pondering, considering, or questioning something, sometimes with a sense of skeptical or ironic observation or encouraging a closer look at some content.”

Take a look at the post here:

An IIT Madras graduate, Srinivas started his career as a Research Intern at OpenAI, where he later returned to work as a researcher. He also did his internship with Google and Deepmind. In addition to being a cofounder of Perplexity, he is also an angel investor for several AI projects.