> In a study of over 16,000 queries, measured against institutional benchmarks from McKinsey, Harvard, MIT, BCG, and others, we determined Perplexity Computer saved our internal teams $1.6M in labor costs and performed 3.25 years of work in only four weeks. And now we’re extending those same capabilities to other teams.
This is a wild statement that does not seem to be supported by any actual data.
What does it mean? Does clicking on a link counts as labor.
> What does it mean? Does clicking on a link counts as labor.
I think we might be seeing what happens when people are being paid too much to spend all day emailing each other and jockeying excel/gantt charts/org charts. Yeah for some definition of "work" I guarantee that a LLM could perform 3.25 years worth in four weeks.
When I'm running a lot of model training workflows concurrently, I can spend a small but noticeable amount of my day just clicking through links to see current progress and logs of any errors. If an AI would be capable of understanding the relatively complex UI, at least enough to find the right links to click, it could make a status report that takes me 15 seconds to read, and from that alone would save $2000 of labor annually.
I think their numbers of $1.6M and 3.25 years is still probably a massive overestimate, but the order of magnitude seems plausible.
If you stop paying this subscription, this living computer with the googly puppy eyes gets it. You wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your best friend, would you? soft whimpering sounds
> I just don't understand what's even intended by this.
I might be misinterpreting, but according to the landing page, this is the intention:
> Personal Computer gives Perplexity Computer and the Comet Assistant always-on, local access to your machine's files, apps, and sessions through a continuously running compact desktop.
> It's a persistent digital proxy of you. Controllable from any device, anywhere.
That being said, the grandeur and bombastic language also seems fitting for something less sinister, like an even worse version of MS Recall maybe? Combined with, let's say... agents!
That's it! You Personal Computer is your agent and not only may act on your behalf, it also communicates your preferences and intentions.
Who in their right mind is going to blindly trust an AI like that? There wasn't any review of the numbers, or even a hint of a "sniff test" on the output of the AI?
Would a real person risk their reputation like that?
--
With regard to the attempted redefinition of a commonly used term, I'm reminded of Gretchen, from the Mean Girls, trying to redefine "Fetch!"[1]
I love (read, hate) the trend of using Serif fonts and marketing material that pull on nostalgic vibes. Surely, AI has been revolutionary in its own regard, for better or worse. But, the more they go into 80/90s style advertising, the more the allure of it dies.
Could it just be a new trend? There are just two options in this case (serifs or no), so I’d expect it to flip back and forth sometimes.
The broader trend is pulling back a bit on “minimalism,” right? I think we hit peak (or valley?) minimalism already so I guess there’s only one way to go.
I do agree with you, there is a reverse in the minimalism trends (which I am incredibly happy to see).
However, in my opinion this specific typeface and aesthetic is been taken up by AI companies to harken back to the likes of the 1984 Macintosh ads and such...in an attempt to try and convey that "$(AI_PRODUCT) is just as revolutionary as the first desktop PCs".
Whatever happened to Preplexity? They were all the rage a year or two ago, and now I hear...nothing. Is the product still being used? Making money? Or just overtaken by the base LLMs it was relying on?
It's still there. For Joe Shmoe, in terms of general purpose, ask it a question, LLM use, Perplexity is solidly in the following lineup, as I understand it:
- Perplexity: This one has been promoted on (insert general audience media skewing toward the older set) enough to be a household name still.
- ChatGPT: General people in some demographics (see immediately above) are averse to this, on account of negative publicity its parent company has received. (Still very strong popularity and positive sentiment in some demographics, though)
- Claude: Some semi-literates have glommed onto this one, possibly as a result of its more recent success among the developer set.
- Grok: People can be either for or against, based on how they feel about its owning company and its ownership; no more need be said
- Gemini: Again, if you are in the universe of its owning company (or decidedly not), the draw (or repulsion) can be strong here.
For general LLM use, the above are all about the same. To be clear, this is just me shooting from the hip for how each offering might be viewed. IMO, it's not a bad idea to submit the same input to each and see how they compare, if one is so inclined.
Funny how you didn't even mention MS Copilot, which many of my friends who work for big corporations seem to have been forced to use at work, and as a consequence, also for personal use.
I need someone who can translate marketing to help me out here. All the other comments seem equally baffled as to what this is. This is clashing with my idea of a personal computer with an AI operating system. Did anyone figure out what chip it uses, if it's local only, does it have a screen or do I plug in peripherals?
They may not come after all the niche companies, but they definitely come after the most successful markets, especially those with low effort moats.
Same goes for relying on the Apple/Google app stores (ex - Apple literally got slapped in court for copying successful apps and then pushing their offering to the top of their stores... talk about wildly abusive behavior).
I may still choose to use AWS/GCP/Azure while trying to find product-market fit as an immature startup, but I'd look real, REAL hard at ditching them as soon as possible afterwards.
Unless you have particularly bursty workloads, they aren't even a good cost saving measure anymore.
The generic elevator music used for the demo video is highly representative of this whole concept: generic and derivative.
Seriously though, Perplexity, like most of the AI wrapper companies, seems unable to innovate much beyond the query-response chat paradigm. I don't understand why VCs continue to fund these ai-slop companies. I see a new company's advertisements on the NY subway every week, and they're all the same: Anthropic/Google/OpenAI resellers who are selling some UI wrapper (or at best a bespoke model worse than the flagships) on top of pretty basic prompt engineering or tools.
This is what happens when we invert the product-paradigm: we're not solving problems with technology, we're taking technology and applying it to problems.
I use AI every day, so I'm hardly a luddite, but this bubble is so ridiculous at this point. This perplexity product, more than any other so far, feels so representative of peak craze.
I'd be willing to bet that every wannabe CEO out there is spooging after seeing that demo. That's clearly the target market: The wantrepreneurs who would surely have their brilliant successful business if only they didn't have to hire a bunch of lazy employees to half-ass it! "If only I could just speak my vague ideas to my computer, and it could do all the hard work of building and running this business, I could just chill out, be an entrepreneur on Insta, and collect the revenue checks.
So basically a thin client where all the data is in the "AI cloud" and you are at the mercy of the mainframe provider. What again happened to "the network is the computer" Sun Microsystems?
Yea, but since they link to a page where they describe openclaw as “malware reading your text messages” I’m assuming they like to think of this as something more evolved
...because this thing will go rogue faster than you can blink.
I swear, it's like nobody at the company even reads the slop they're generating or thinks about it for any amount of time. In what world is advertising a kill switch as one of its essential features a positive? It's basically admitting from the start that this is unreliable.
They replaced their production staff with clawbot, it's all part of the plan.
There's a sense of "early bitcoin" around clawbot and other agent frameworks. I think if you wait for another 2 years for it to mature, you'll have missed out as if you waited ten years after bitcoin began.
They're insecure and janky, sure, but on the other hand you've got millions of dollars of compute and tens of thousands of very motivated developers working on making them secure, reliable, and competent. There's something magical about AI that actually gets real work done while you're doing other things, and that's what Perplexity is probably hoping to sell.
Just need a reliable local model, though - AirLLM, other hacks allow you to run bigger models more slowly, so you can build out a completely API-free scheme to run pretty capable agents even without big GPUs.
Could be a Moravec's paradox thing - all these people are thinking that the solution looks enticingly within reach, but it might be an absolutely horribly complicated quagmire with no easy solution short of AGI. I'd bet on clawbots and agents being very secure and great to work with in the very near term, though.
Stop posting AI slop, especially slop pull requests like the one you made to OpenClaw. Learn the first thing about a project you want to monetize and make fake contributions to. For example, OpenClaw is overwhelmed with slop PRs and the author has talked about this a lot.
> In a study of over 16,000 queries, measured against institutional benchmarks from McKinsey, Harvard, MIT, BCG, and others, we determined Perplexity Computer saved our internal teams $1.6M in labor costs and performed 3.25 years of work in only four weeks. And now we’re extending those same capabilities to other teams.
This is a wild statement that does not seem to be supported by any actual data.
What does it mean? Does clicking on a link counts as labor.
> What does it mean? Does clicking on a link counts as labor.
I think we might be seeing what happens when people are being paid too much to spend all day emailing each other and jockeying excel/gantt charts/org charts. Yeah for some definition of "work" I guarantee that a LLM could perform 3.25 years worth in four weeks.
When I'm running a lot of model training workflows concurrently, I can spend a small but noticeable amount of my day just clicking through links to see current progress and logs of any errors. If an AI would be capable of understanding the relatively complex UI, at least enough to find the right links to click, it could make a status report that takes me 15 seconds to read, and from that alone would save $2000 of labor annually.
I think their numbers of $1.6M and 3.25 years is still probably a massive overestimate, but the order of magnitude seems plausible.
> the computer lives with you.
What does this mean? The computer isn't alive. It's physically located on my person? Phones and watches have already cracked this.
If I say "Bob lives with me", that just mean that they generally share a residence with me. Desktop PCs already do that.
I just don't understand what's even intended by this.
> What does this mean? The computer isn't alive.
But they want you to think of it as alive. They're anthropomorphizing it.
If you stop paying this subscription, this living computer with the googly puppy eyes gets it. You wouldn't want anything bad to happen to your best friend, would you? soft whimpering sounds
> I just don't understand what's even intended by this.
I might be misinterpreting, but according to the landing page, this is the intention:
> Personal Computer gives Perplexity Computer and the Comet Assistant always-on, local access to your machine's files, apps, and sessions through a continuously running compact desktop.
> It's a persistent digital proxy of you. Controllable from any device, anywhere.
That being said, the grandeur and bombastic language also seems fitting for something less sinister, like an even worse version of MS Recall maybe? Combined with, let's say... agents!
That's it! You Personal Computer is your agent and not only may act on your behalf, it also communicates your preferences and intentions.
Futuristic, right?
Who in their right mind is going to blindly trust an AI like that? There wasn't any review of the numbers, or even a hint of a "sniff test" on the output of the AI?
Would a real person risk their reputation like that?
--
With regard to the attempted redefinition of a commonly used term, I'm reminded of Gretchen, from the Mean Girls, trying to redefine "Fetch!"[1]
It's just not going to happen.
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0377092/quotes/
> Who in their right mind is going to blindly trust an AI like that?
… particularly with acts that have legal implications like … well, almost everything, but particularly communication with investors or board members.
If people can get slides or summaries by pushing a button, they don't need others to push the button for them.
From the blog post (https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/everything-is-computer)
>Personal Computer runs on a dedicated Mac mini that can run 24/7, connected to your local apps and Perplexity’s secure servers.
Ohhh so it’s just openclaw. Innovative.
Surely a highly innovative product that will sell in high volumes /s
Oh no, April Fool's Day is going to be tremendously awful this year, isn't it
It's been perpetual April 1st since November 30th, 2022.
September, surely.
I love (read, hate) the trend of using Serif fonts and marketing material that pull on nostalgic vibes. Surely, AI has been revolutionary in its own regard, for better or worse. But, the more they go into 80/90s style advertising, the more the allure of it dies.
Also this "system" just seems vulnerable af.
Could it just be a new trend? There are just two options in this case (serifs or no), so I’d expect it to flip back and forth sometimes.
The broader trend is pulling back a bit on “minimalism,” right? I think we hit peak (or valley?) minimalism already so I guess there’s only one way to go.
I do agree with you, there is a reverse in the minimalism trends (which I am incredibly happy to see).
However, in my opinion this specific typeface and aesthetic is been taken up by AI companies to harken back to the likes of the 1984 Macintosh ads and such...in an attempt to try and convey that "$(AI_PRODUCT) is just as revolutionary as the first desktop PCs".
I think you're right. AI is being sold on promises of maximalism, in a way.
Build everything, do anything, give AI all your data and thoughts and system access and it will give you the world!
I'm not surprised our own "roaring" 20s is seeing this shift.
The specific font here is clearly meant to reference the marketing for the original Macintosh.
Whatever happened to Preplexity? They were all the rage a year or two ago, and now I hear...nothing. Is the product still being used? Making money? Or just overtaken by the base LLMs it was relying on?
It's still there. For Joe Shmoe, in terms of general purpose, ask it a question, LLM use, Perplexity is solidly in the following lineup, as I understand it:
- Perplexity: This one has been promoted on (insert general audience media skewing toward the older set) enough to be a household name still.
- ChatGPT: General people in some demographics (see immediately above) are averse to this, on account of negative publicity its parent company has received. (Still very strong popularity and positive sentiment in some demographics, though)
- Claude: Some semi-literates have glommed onto this one, possibly as a result of its more recent success among the developer set.
- Grok: People can be either for or against, based on how they feel about its owning company and its ownership; no more need be said
- Gemini: Again, if you are in the universe of its owning company (or decidedly not), the draw (or repulsion) can be strong here.
For general LLM use, the above are all about the same. To be clear, this is just me shooting from the hip for how each offering might be viewed. IMO, it's not a bad idea to submit the same input to each and see how they compare, if one is so inclined.
Funny how you didn't even mention MS Copilot, which many of my friends who work for big corporations seem to have been forced to use at work, and as a consequence, also for personal use.
I need someone who can translate marketing to help me out here. All the other comments seem equally baffled as to what this is. This is clashing with my idea of a personal computer with an AI operating system. Did anyone figure out what chip it uses, if it's local only, does it have a screen or do I plug in peripherals?
Mac Mini connected to their "secure servers", so of course it's the opposite of the claimed local and private...
> The computer still computes. But now, for the first time, the computer lives with you.
No, it doesn't, because it's not alive.
No moat. If you rely on OpenAI / Google / Anthropic you are doomed.
Do you feel the same about AWS?
Personally - yes.
They may not come after all the niche companies, but they definitely come after the most successful markets, especially those with low effort moats.
Same goes for relying on the Apple/Google app stores (ex - Apple literally got slapped in court for copying successful apps and then pushing their offering to the top of their stores... talk about wildly abusive behavior).
I may still choose to use AWS/GCP/Azure while trying to find product-market fit as an immature startup, but I'd look real, REAL hard at ditching them as soon as possible afterwards.
Unless you have particularly bursty workloads, they aren't even a good cost saving measure anymore.
Amazon do absolutely the same, they just rip off products with best margin and lowest effort and start them reselling themselves.
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/amazon-i...
Which side are you implying AWS is on?
The generic elevator music used for the demo video is highly representative of this whole concept: generic and derivative.
Seriously though, Perplexity, like most of the AI wrapper companies, seems unable to innovate much beyond the query-response chat paradigm. I don't understand why VCs continue to fund these ai-slop companies. I see a new company's advertisements on the NY subway every week, and they're all the same: Anthropic/Google/OpenAI resellers who are selling some UI wrapper (or at best a bespoke model worse than the flagships) on top of pretty basic prompt engineering or tools.
This is what happens when we invert the product-paradigm: we're not solving problems with technology, we're taking technology and applying it to problems.
I use AI every day, so I'm hardly a luddite, but this bubble is so ridiculous at this point. This perplexity product, more than any other so far, feels so representative of peak craze.
I'd be willing to bet that every wannabe CEO out there is spooging after seeing that demo. That's clearly the target market: The wantrepreneurs who would surely have their brilliant successful business if only they didn't have to hire a bunch of lazy employees to half-ass it! "If only I could just speak my vague ideas to my computer, and it could do all the hard work of building and running this business, I could just chill out, be an entrepreneur on Insta, and collect the revenue checks.
So basically a thin client where all the data is in the "AI cloud" and you are at the mercy of the mainframe provider. What again happened to "the network is the computer" Sun Microsystems?
Zombo.com
You can do anything on zombocom
I thought of zombo.com the other day and booted it up. There is maybe no other website that continues to bring me as much joy as zombocom
Unfortunately the zombo.com domain expired, and whoever snatched it replaced the audio with AI generated shit. Nothing is sacred anymore.
However you can still do anything at https://html5zombo.com/
underrated comment haha. made my day
Most perplexing product description I’ve read in some time from a major company
Openclaw + Microsoft Recall = Personal computer by perplexity. At least this is my interpretation from reading that web page.
Page is unreabable on smaller phone such as my IPhone SE as text gets cropped out on the sides and cannot be zoomed out. Did I miss anything?
read it and have no idea what it does
I think it's an LLM wrapper.
it’s not ZIRP anymore but it might as well be. you can truly get funded to make anything right now
Sneaky use of an almost Garamond, but the copy ain't Chiat\Day.
Wow they designed a computer I don’t want
> Personal Computer runs on a dedicated Mac mini that can run 24/7, connected to your local apps and Perplexity’s secure servers.
https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/everything-is-computer
They designed a program (copied OpenClaw) and called it a computer
Yea, but since they link to a page where they describe openclaw as “malware reading your text messages” I’m assuming they like to think of this as something more evolved
Say more?
> There is a kill switch
...because this thing will go rogue faster than you can blink.
I swear, it's like nobody at the company even reads the slop they're generating or thinks about it for any amount of time. In what world is advertising a kill switch as one of its essential features a positive? It's basically admitting from the start that this is unreliable.
They replaced their production staff with clawbot, it's all part of the plan.
There's a sense of "early bitcoin" around clawbot and other agent frameworks. I think if you wait for another 2 years for it to mature, you'll have missed out as if you waited ten years after bitcoin began.
They're insecure and janky, sure, but on the other hand you've got millions of dollars of compute and tens of thousands of very motivated developers working on making them secure, reliable, and competent. There's something magical about AI that actually gets real work done while you're doing other things, and that's what Perplexity is probably hoping to sell.
Just need a reliable local model, though - AirLLM, other hacks allow you to run bigger models more slowly, so you can build out a completely API-free scheme to run pretty capable agents even without big GPUs.
Could be a Moravec's paradox thing - all these people are thinking that the solution looks enticingly within reach, but it might be an absolutely horribly complicated quagmire with no easy solution short of AGI. I'd bet on clawbots and agents being very secure and great to work with in the very near term, though.
Ten years ago I would have thought this was an excellent April Fool's Day launch. Now I just think it's foolish.
>Personal Computer
>Depends on our SaaS
Pick one.
Blog post: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/everything-is-computer
Is that a reference to Trump in the Tesla?
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9fza3s
So Perplexity's openclaw? Hopefully more secure?
I’m not sure i understand this, is this some kind of corporate openclaw?
The video concept is great, and how I often have been thinking that personal digital assistants would make sense.
Basing this concept on what we have today with LLMs is a call for chaos, unreliability and slop communication; at best.
Stop posting AI slop, especially slop pull requests like the one you made to OpenClaw. Learn the first thing about a project you want to monetize and make fake contributions to. For example, OpenClaw is overwhelmed with slop PRs and the author has talked about this a lot.
OH so that's why it's called Perplexity!
sounds like it's another openclaw-as-a-service provider?
TL;DR - Perplexity-branded OpenClaw
It is an OS with AI chat interface, as far as I can understand.
Yes, they sure made their own OS