Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas: 'Token Value Per Watt Per User' Will Decide Who Wins the AI Race

CNBC·medium signal

Srinivas reframes the AI competition around efficiency rather than raw capability — whoever delivers the most useful tokens per watt per user wins — and demonstrated Perplexity's new 'Personal Computer' agent (an 'orchestrator') onstage with Intel's CEO, processing confidential deal materials. It's a notable pivot from benchmark-chasing to unit economics as the moat. For builders, it signals that agent products will increasingly compete on cost-to-serve and orchestration, not just model quality.