An Indian web developer demonstrated how Perplexity AI’s Comet browser could autonomously breeze through an entire Coursera course on AI ethics in mere seconds, prompting a swift and stern rebuke from the company’s co-founder and CEO, Aravind Srinivas, who warned against such misuse of the tool. The developer’s X post, which exploded within hours of being shared, featured a video showcasing Comet’s prowess in answering questions and tackling tasks without any human input.
The Indian techie shared his stinit on Comet with a cheeky caption “Just completed my Coursera course,” complete with thanks to Srinivas, Perplexity, and the AI itself. The irony couldn’t be thicker, the course in question? “AI Ethics, Responsibility and Creativity,” a program designed to explore the very moral quandaries this stunt exemplifies.
The video, captured in real-time, illustrated Comet’s autonomous capabilities as it navigated the Coursera’s interactive elements, firing off precise responses to quizzes and assignments with eerie efficiency, effectively “completing” the course in a fraction of the time it would take a learner.
Srinivas, the 31-year-old Chennai-born IIT Madras alumnus and former researcher at OpenAI, Google, and DeepMind, didn’t mince words in his reply, which was screenshotted and widely circulated, “Absolutely don’t do this.”