34 comments

  • _pdp_48 minutes ago
    &gt; 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.<p>This is a wild statement that does not seem to be supported by any actual data.<p>What does it mean? Does clicking on a link counts as labor.
    • Avicebron12 minutes ago
      &gt; What does it mean? Does clicking on a link counts as labor.<p>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&#x2F;gantt charts&#x2F;org charts. Yeah for some definition of &quot;work&quot; I guarantee that a LLM could perform 3.25 years worth in four weeks.
  • mikewarot12 minutes ago
    Who in their right mind is going to blindly trust an AI like that? There wasn&#x27;t any review of the numbers, or even a hint of a &quot;sniff test&quot; on the output of the AI?<p>Would a real person risk their reputation like that?<p>--<p>With regard to the attempted redefinition of a commonly used term, I&#x27;m reminded of Gretchen, from the Mean Girls, trying to redefine &quot;Fetch!&quot;[1]<p>It&#x27;s just not going to happen.<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0377092&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0377092&#x2F;quotes&#x2F;</a>
  • recursive2 hours ago
    &gt; the computer lives with you.<p>What does this mean? The computer isn&#x27;t alive. It&#x27;s physically located on my person? Phones and watches have already cracked this.<p>If I say &quot;Bob lives with me&quot;, that just mean that they generally share a residence with me. Desktop PCs already do that.<p>I just don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s even intended by this.
    • thedanbob1 hour ago
      &gt; What does this mean? The computer isn&#x27;t alive.<p>But they want you to think of it as alive. They&#x27;re anthropomorphizing it.
      • recursive1 hour ago
        If you stop paying this subscription, this living computer with the googly puppy eyes <i>gets it</i>. You wouldn&#x27;t want anything bad to happen to your best friend, would you? <i>soft whimpering sounds</i>
    • moritzwarhier2 hours ago
      &gt; I just don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s even intended by this.<p>I might be misinterpreting, but according to the landing page, this is the intention:<p>&gt; Personal Computer gives Perplexity Computer and the Comet Assistant always-on, local access to your machine&#x27;s files, apps, and sessions through a continuously running compact desktop.<p>&gt; It&#x27;s a persistent digital proxy of you. Controllable from any device, anywhere.<p>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&#x27;s say... <i>agents</i>!<p>That&#x27;s it! You Personal Computer is your agent and not only may act on your behalf, it also communicates your preferences and intentions.<p>Futuristic, right?
  • jcims58 minutes ago
    From the blog post (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perplexity.ai&#x2F;hub&#x2F;blog&#x2F;everything-is-computer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perplexity.ai&#x2F;hub&#x2F;blog&#x2F;everything-is-computer</a>)<p>&gt;Personal Computer runs on a dedicated Mac mini that can run 24&#x2F;7, connected to your local apps and Perplexity’s secure servers.
    • snek_case46 minutes ago
      Surely a highly innovative product that will sell in high volumes &#x2F;s
  • suobset39 minutes ago
    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&#x2F;90s style advertising, the more the allure of it dies.<p>Also this &quot;system&quot; just seems vulnerable af.
    • bee_rider23 minutes ago
      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.<p>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.
  • nlpart117 minutes ago
    So basically a thin client where all the data is in the &quot;AI cloud&quot; and you are at the mercy of the mainframe provider. What again happened to &quot;the network is the computer&quot; Sun Microsystems?
  • microsoftedging11 minutes ago
    &gt; The computer still computes. But now, for the first time, the computer lives with you.<p>No, it doesn&#x27;t, because it&#x27;s not alive.
  • aaronbrethorst2 hours ago
    Oh no, April Fool&#x27;s Day is going to be tremendously awful this year, isn&#x27;t it
    • ch4s31 hour ago
      It&#x27;s been perpetual April 1st since November 30th, 2022.
  • skyberrys57 minutes ago
    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&#x27;s local only, does it have a screen or do I plug in peripherals?
    • g-b-r3 minutes ago
      Mac Mini connected to their &quot;secure servers&quot;, so of course it&#x27;s the opposite of the claimed local and private...
  • SirensOfTitan1 hour ago
    The generic elevator music used for the demo video is highly representative of this whole concept: generic and derivative.<p>Seriously though, Perplexity, like most of the AI wrapper companies, seems unable to innovate much beyond the query-response chat paradigm. I don&#x27;t understand why VCs continue to fund these ai-slop companies. I see a new company&#x27;s advertisements on the NY subway every week, and they&#x27;re all the same: Anthropic&#x2F;Google&#x2F;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.<p>This is what happens when we invert the product-paradigm: we&#x27;re not solving problems with technology, we&#x27;re taking technology and applying it to problems.<p>I use AI every day, so I&#x27;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.
  • password543212 hours ago
    No moat. If you rely on OpenAI &#x2F; Google &#x2F; Anthropic you are doomed.
    • chrismarlow91 hour ago
      Do you feel the same about AWS?
      • horsawlarway27 minutes ago
        Personally - yes.<p>They may not come after all the niche companies, but they definitely come after the most successful markets, especially those with low effort moats.<p>Same goes for relying on the Apple&#x2F;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).<p>I may still choose to use AWS&#x2F;GCP&#x2F;Azure while trying to find product-market fit as an immature startup, but I&#x27;d look real, REAL hard at ditching them as soon as possible afterwards.<p>Unless you have particularly bursty workloads, they aren&#x27;t even a good cost saving measure anymore.
      • paxys1 hour ago
        Which side are you implying AWS is on?
  • znpy3 minutes ago
    I’m not sure i understand this, is this some kind of corporate openclaw?
  • gensym1 hour ago
    Zombo.com
    • viksit43 minutes ago
      underrated comment haha. made my day
  • paxys1 hour ago
    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?
    • realityfactchex53 minutes ago
      It&#x27;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:<p>- Perplexity: This one has been promoted on (insert general audience media skewing toward the older set) enough to be a household name still.<p>- 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)<p>- Claude: Some semi-literates have glommed onto this one, possibly as a result of its more recent success among the developer set.<p>- 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<p>- Gemini: Again, if you are in the universe of its owning company (or decidedly not), the draw (or repulsion) can be strong here.<p>For <i>general LLM use</i>, 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&#x27;s not a bad idea to submit the same input to each and see how they compare, if one is so inclined.
      • w4der2 minutes ago
        Funny how you didn&#x27;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.
  • maxaw20 minutes ago
    Most perplexing product description I’ve read in some time from a major company
  • tartoran1 hour ago
    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?
  • QQ002 hours ago
    Openclaw + Microsoft Recall = Personal computer by perplexity. At least this is my interpretation from reading that web page.
  • par1 hour ago
    read it and have no idea what it does
    • cedws1 hour ago
      I think it&#x27;s an LLM wrapper.
  • claysmithr1 hour ago
    Wow they designed a computer I don’t want
    • Zambyte28 minutes ago
      &gt; Personal Computer runs on a dedicated Mac mini that can run 24&#x2F;7, connected to your local apps and Perplexity’s secure servers.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perplexity.ai&#x2F;hub&#x2F;blog&#x2F;everything-is-computer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perplexity.ai&#x2F;hub&#x2F;blog&#x2F;everything-is-computer</a><p>They designed a program (copied OpenClaw) and called it a computer
    • ncr1001 hour ago
      Say more?
  • jkestner2 hours ago
    Sneaky use of an almost Garamond, but the copy ain&#x27;t Chiat\Day.
  • d_silin35 minutes ago
    It is an OS with AI chat interface, as far as I can understand.
    • g-b-r1 minute ago
      Yes, they sure made their own OS
  • eitally1 hour ago
    Ten years ago I would have thought this was an excellent April Fool&#x27;s Day launch. Now I just think it&#x27;s foolish.
  • gtowey2 hours ago
    &gt; There is a kill switch<p>...because this thing <i>will</i> go rogue faster than you can blink.<p>I swear, it&#x27;s like nobody at the company even reads the slop they&#x27;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&#x27;s basically admitting from the start that this is unreliable.
    • observationist1 hour ago
      They replaced their production staff with clawbot, it&#x27;s all part of the plan.<p>There&#x27;s a sense of &quot;early bitcoin&quot; around clawbot and other agent frameworks. I think if you wait for another 2 years for it to mature, you&#x27;ll have missed out as if you waited ten years after bitcoin began.<p>They&#x27;re insecure and janky, sure, but on the other hand you&#x27;ve got millions of dollars of compute and tens of thousands of very motivated developers working on making them secure, reliable, and competent. There&#x27;s something magical about AI that actually gets real work done while you&#x27;re doing other things, and that&#x27;s what Perplexity is probably hoping to sell.<p>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.<p>Could be a Moravec&#x27;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&#x27;d bet on clawbots and agents being very secure and great to work with in the very near term, though.
  • ChrisArchitect1 hour ago
    Blog post: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perplexity.ai&#x2F;hub&#x2F;blog&#x2F;everything-is-computer" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.perplexity.ai&#x2F;hub&#x2F;blog&#x2F;everything-is-computer</a>
  • irusensei48 minutes ago
    &gt;Personal Computer<p>&gt;Depends on our SaaS<p>Pick one.
  • d--b2 hours ago
    OH so that&#x27;s why it&#x27;s called Perplexity!
  • dakial13 hours ago
    So Perplexity&#x27;s openclaw? Hopefully more secure?
  • mhitza48 minutes ago
    The video concept is great, and how I often have been thinking that personal digital assistants would make sense.<p>Basing this concept on what we have today with LLMs is a call for chaos, unreliability and slop communication; at best.
  • HumanOstrich2 hours ago
    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.
  • bisonbear1 hour ago
    sounds like it&#x27;s another openclaw-as-a-service provider?
  • paxys1 hour ago
    TL;DR - Perplexity-branded OpenClaw