Personal Computer by Perplexity

(perplexity.ai)

58 points | by josephwegner 4 hours ago ago

39 comments

  • _pdp_ 20 minutes ago

    > 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.

  • suobset 10 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 80/90s style advertising, the more the allure of it dies.

    Also this "system" just seems vulnerable af.

  • recursive 2 hours ago

    > 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.

    • thedanbob an hour ago

      > What does this mean? The computer isn't alive.

      But they want you to think of it as alive. They're anthropomorphizing it.

      • recursive an hour ago

        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

    • moritzwarhier 2 hours ago

      > 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?

  • jcims 30 minutes ago

    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.

    • snek_case 18 minutes ago

      Surely a highly innovative product that will sell in high volumes /s

  • skyberrys 29 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's local only, does it have a screen or do I plug in peripherals?

  • aaronbrethorst 2 hours ago

    Oh no, April Fool's Day is going to be tremendously awful this year, isn't it

    • ch4s3 an hour ago

      It's been perpetual April 1st since November 30th, 2022.

  • d_silin 7 minutes ago

    It is an OS with AI chat interface, as far as I can understand.

  • paxys 39 minutes 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?

    • realityfactchex 25 minutes ago

      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.

  • SirensOfTitan 34 minutes ago

    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.

  • gensym an hour ago

    Zombo.com

    • viksit 15 minutes ago

      underrated comment haha. made my day

  • tartoran 35 minutes 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?

  • password54321 2 hours ago

    No moat. If you rely on OpenAI / Google / Anthropic you are doomed.

  • QQ00 2 hours ago

    Openclaw + Microsoft Recall = Personal computer by perplexity. At least this is my interpretation from reading that web page.

  • claysmithr an hour ago

    Wow they designed a computer I don’t want

  • eitally 36 minutes ago

    Ten years ago I would have thought this was an excellent April Fool's Day launch. Now I just think it's foolish.

  • jkestner 2 hours ago

    Sneaky use of an almost Garamond, but the copy ain't Chiat\Day.

  • par an hour ago

    read it and have no idea what it does

    • cedws an hour ago

      I think it's an LLM wrapper.

  • gtowey 2 hours ago

    > 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.

    • observationist an hour ago

      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.

  • irusensei 20 minutes ago

    >Personal Computer

    >Depends on our SaaS

    Pick one.

  • mhitza 20 minutes ago

    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.

  • dakial1 3 hours ago

    So Perplexity's openclaw? Hopefully more secure?

  • ChrisArchitect an hour ago
  • HumanOstrich 2 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.

  • d--b 2 hours ago

    OH so that's why it's called Perplexity!

  • bisonbear an hour ago

    sounds like it's another openclaw-as-a-service provider?

  • paxys 37 minutes ago

    TL;DR - Perplexity-branded OpenClaw