Personal Computer by Perplexity | Hacker News Reader

Personal Computer by Perplexity

perplexity.ai

223 pointsjosephwegner173 comments

> 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.

Having been involved in this sort of exercise before, I can explain.

What they will have done is asked a human who should be knowledgeable approximately how much time they spend on the activity (e.g.: how long do you normally spend copy and pasting? How long do you spend looking for the files you need? etc.). When you ask someone whose job it is, they tend to overestimate, and on top of that, you break down the questions as much as possible, so these small overestimations compound without it being obvious to the person that they're making a mistake. It's easy enough to spot that you've said 'four hours' but you know a task doesn't to take you a full morning.

Once you've got all these answers, you ask how often the person has to do it.

Then you ask someone in HR for an average salary you can use. Now that AI is doing that work, you multiply the number of hours saved by the average salary, and report that as your savings.

Something, as usual, stinks about these numbers. $1.6M in saved labour costs, and 3.25 years of work in 4 weeks are basically two ways of saying the same thing (labour costs vs improved productivity).

So let's say 3.25 years of work is around 160 weeks, minus the four weeks they actually took, so 156 weeks of productivity savings. Assume 40 hour weeks, that's 6,240 hours 'saved'. Which works out at around $250/hour, which... well. You decide if that's plausible.

So they ask people to self-report for control, then measure actual time for treatment? Holy scientific methodology, Batman.

Copy Pasting World Champion 2026

> 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.

For many tasks, being able to turn it over to an LLM means nobody really wanted the task done in the first place.

We should definitely seek ways to turn things over to AI. Then turn the AI off, and figure out what actually needed to be done.

>> Harvard, MIT

> people are being paid too much to spend all day emailing each other

Hmm, this does not sound exactly right. Also, does anybody seriously think that communication is not work, or is not important? A number of really impactful things started from people emailing each other. (Hell, Linux kernel development is still much about people emailing patches each other.)

The problem with human labor is that, as an organization scales, the amount of work any individual in the system can do shrinks due to the coordination problem.

Coordination consumes a larger and larger amount of employee time to the point that, in the absolute largest organizations, the vast majority of employee time is internal coordination vs. actual improvement/selling of the customer offering.

So if you go from 100 employees to 1,000 employees, they can MAYBE do 4X the work. Not 10X like you'd think. And this effect gets even worse as you scale further.

So if an AI can do 10X more labor in a human day, and can coordinate instantaneously via a central context ledger (say a git repo), it doesn't just create 10X gains in productivity for large orgs. It creates a multiple of that 10X due to also removing the human coordination overhead.

Don't you think AI itself is something that adds coordination overhead? A 1000 strong team with AI agents will feel like 5000-person company where more than 30% are not even at exception level - i.e. they need to be pulled along.

This is why having less people and more agents actually makes sense but the coordination problem remains either way.

And you cannot escape it because it is simply mathematical.

The coordination problem absolutely can be escaped with technology, hence why productivity gains exist and why the economy grows and isn't a fixed pie over time.

Here's an easy non-AI example:

In the past, a 'computer' was literally a person [1]. If you needed to synthesize large amounts of data, you needed to split the task among a team of people writing things down and then a team of people to check their work after the fact and then a team of people to combine all the work and then a team to double-check the combined work.

Tasks that in the past would have taken a room full of people coordinating with pencils are absolutely done by 1 machine today (what we know as computers) that no longer needs to split that task and coordinate, which is exactly what will happen with 'agents' who can take on vastly more work per unit of time.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_(occupation)

Look up Amdahl's Law and Universal Scalability Law.

The math doesn't care whether the nodes are people, CPUs or language models. If agent A's next action depends on what agent B decided, you've introduced a sequential dependency.

The point is that we don't need an equivalent number of nodes (agents) as we needed people.

The computer flattened the coordination dependencies of that room full of people by doing all the calculations by itself. As they get smarter, you can theoretically assume 1 agent could eventually run the entire US federal government.

In the historical [human] computer example; if 15,000 calculations needed to be done, a CPU doesn't need to wait on Bob to come back from lunch to do the next 20 calculations...and doesn't need to wait on Alice to combine his work with the 20 calculations done by Jane...and doesn't need Bill to wait for everybody to be done to double check Jane's work.

The CPU does all 15,000 calculations instantly, by itself. This will be similar with AI agents.

Note that Amdahl's rule doesn't capture the practical situation.

1) The purpose of algorithms is ultimately to create value, not compute some fixed value X. This is important as it gives flexibility to choose different value producing tasks where parallelism dominates over serial tasks, whenever the the latter becomes a bottleneck.

2) In terms of producing value, perfect accuracy or the best possible solutions are not always necessary. Many serial tasks can become very parallel tasks when accuracy or certainty do not have to be complete.

3) Solutions that are reusable changes the math further. No matter how serial a calculation is, if something is calculated that can be reused, that serial part becomes effectively order O(1), after calculation if reused exactly, but as neural network demonstrate, many serial tasks become very parallelized after training a model that can be reused for now a wide class of specific problems. Resulting in very amortized serial computing costs.

It doesn't matter how many steps something takes, if those steps are now in the past and the value is "forever" reusable.

4) The economics of serial and parallel computation are not static, but improve relative to economic value achieved. Meaning that demand for cheaper serial time and currency costs result in improved scaled up hardware that delivers cheaper serial costs. This may have less impact than the previous points, but over years makes a tremendous difference on top of all those points.

This can go on.

The point being Amdahl's law certainly applies to specific algorithms, but is not the dominant determinant of computing in general, and not useful application of computing to a significant degree, where problems can be strategically chosen, strategically weakened or altered, and can be strategically fashioned to create O(V) of value - to balance any O(S) cost of serial computing, via direct reuse and generalization.

In an organization, the number of sequential steps doesn't really scale with number of participants, does it? Rather with dependent steps of the tackled process; say, devise building permit request, await approval, purchase materials, move materials to site, hire workforce, etc.

Theoretically, each of those steps is parallelizable to some extent. Amdahl's law equivalent here would be that some delays are outside the reach of an organization to improve. For instance, a building permit will take the time it takes to be examined based on an external public administration.

Critically, Amdahl’s Law remains a conjecture until we have the maths to disjoin complexity class P from NC.

Yep, I call this the "Conway Overhead": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270142

This is so true. I can see the same in our organisation. So much time wasted on bullshit busywork and red tape.

Does anybody seriously think that communication is something an LLM can do for you?

(Hint: if you have to prompt it to write an email -- you could have saved everyone some time and emailed the prompt instead.)

I have several friends at the big 4 who work ~2 hour weeks.

While it might sound like the ultimate hack, it’s not.

I’ve been in that situation and died a little inside everyday. It’s not like being a rentier, because you still have to lose most of your day at the office and pretend to work, and be available in case some higher up needs something so you don’t get caught.

It might sound sweet but it’s hell.

Looks like Graebers bullshit jobs, right?

  1. https://davidgraeber.org/articles/on-the-phenomenon-of-bullshit-jobs-a-work-rant/
  2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs
  3. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-bullshit-jobs

Completely agreed. The thought that "people emailing each other" is a problem that should be "automated" away is delusional.

Some type of emailing is important, what most people do, however, is not. Same with meetings, calls etc. Most of it is filling the day so they don't get fired.

This is such a broad generalization it is easy to dismiss.

Yours is such an unspecific criticism it's impossible to take seriously.

I guess we’re at a stalemate, then.

The amazing thing is that soon (actually already) we will be seeing people being paid way too much to prompt a LLM to email other people or respond to other peoples emails. And then turn these emails into presentations which will be turned into meeting transcripts again followed by emails.

The lingering question is if the intermediate LLM translation steps will actually make our communication more efficient - or just amplify the already inefficient parts.

Inefficiency all too often is celebrated by our society, as I wrote in 2010: https://pdfernhout.net/beyond-a-jobless-recovery-knol.html "Also, many current industries that employ large numbers of people (ranging from the health insurance industry, the compulsory schooling industry, the defense industry, the fossil fuel industry, conventional agriculture industry, the software industry, the newspaper and media industries, and some consumer products industries) are coming under pressure from various movements from both the left and the right of the political spectrum in ways that might reduce the need for much paid work in various ways. Such changes might either directly eliminate jobs or, by increasing jobs temporarily eliminate subsequent problems in other areas and the jobs that go with them (as reflected in projections of overall cost savings by such transitions); for example building new wind farms instead of new coal plants might reduce medical expenses from asthma or from mercury poisoning. A single-payer health care movement, a homeschooling and alternative education movement, a global peace movement, a renewable energy movement, an organic agriculture movement, a free software movement, a peer-to-peer movement, a small government movement, an environmental movement, and a voluntary simplicity movement, taken together as a global mindshift of the collective imagination, have the potential to eliminate the need for many millions of paid jobs in the USA while providing enormous direct and indirect cost savings. This would make the unemployment situation much worse than it currently is, while paradoxically possibly improving our society and lowering taxes. Many of the current justifications for continuing social policies that may have problematical effects on the health of society, pose global security risks, or may waste prosperity in various ways is that they create vast numbers of paid jobs as a form of make-work."

Philosophy territory now... you wrote about technology making labor unnecessary 15 years ago - Aristotele did ~2000 years ago too (same text where he tried to justify slavery but nvm that): "For if every instrument could accomplish its own work, obeying or anticipating the will of others, [...] if, in like manner, the shuttle would weave and the plectrum touch the lyre without a hand to guide them, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves."

I bet in 2000 years they will still be writing about it - yeah, technology changes our lives (for better or worse).

It's pretty fascinating to look at the impacts this has had in the last 2000 years, or even just the last 200.

Take construction work. Incredible improvements through power tools, gasoline-powered mobile cranes, etc. The productivity per worker has exploded. A lot of this has been captured by induced demand: we build bigger, taller, grander. But the improvements aren't distributed equally. Which means that crafts that haven't seen much improvement are now more expensive in comparison to everything else. Which has contributed to our buildings having less elaborate facades and becoming more "bland"

The same in clothing. Clothing has become dirt cheap. Even the poorest people can afford new clothing multiple times a year. But in the same transition we have gone from everything being custom tailored to most things only kind of fitting, being made for variations of the most common body shapes. Not necessarily because tailored clothing has become much more expensive (though higher labor costs from higher average productivity haven't helped), but because every other step has become cheaper and tailoring hasn't.

I wonder what we will say about the trajectory of software in a couple decades

That's a great angle - will handcrafted software of the future become the equivalent of a tailored suit today? One might argue it already is, most companies and individuals do just fine using cloud/SaaS offerings and COTS apps. So on first glance it seems like automating software engineering would mainly benefit exactly those providers. The other side of the coin is that it also allows for cheaper/faster in-house DIY solutions and competition.

Yeah, I could see a world where it swings exactly the opposite way for software. Writing software for yourself is becoming cheap, but gathering requirements, getting alignment between stakeholders or marketing your software isn't getting much cheaper. Maybe everyone will end up with their own in-house solution? Or maybe we end up with configurable SAP-like behemoths, but instead of an army of expensive consultants configuring the software for your use case you have AI agents taking that part

I'm sure whatever path this takes will seems obvious in hindsight

I see how this can boost productivity...for those that today already produce value voluntarily. These will move one level higher. The rest with 100x the amount of performative work. Everyone will be busier created presentations and charts that no one needs and no one will read. Managers will ask for new presentations and reports every sync, and hours will be spent discussing things that don't actually matter.

I don't think they're measuring the _value_ of the work, just what it would've cost to have humans do it. How long would it take you to produce a report of a specific length on the history of changes to the White House approved by presidents over time that includes citations and links to sources? Let's say 40 hours? Boom. $100 per hour * 40 hours = $4,000 report and 1 weeks worth of effort produced in 15 minutes. Multiply this type of "work" by 400 and you have $1.6M in labor costs and 7.6 years of work.

I'm perpetually cautious about wild tech claims myself, but if you watch the launch video, there are examples of how they could claim labor/cost savings.

For example, one task takes a document with data, charts, and metrics, and Perplexity Computer was tasked with creating a 10-page slide deck for a presentation. Prior to AI, that took human capital and labor costs.

I can't say whether the $1.6M in labor costs is legit or not, but these tools are not just clicking links in 2026.

Why would you make a presentation?

send me the data and ill ask my own AI to do it in my favorite silly voice.

Bingo!

Comparing to pre-chatgpt workflows makes for useless statements

I want to know pre-"personal computer by perplexity"

You don't think there's cost/labor savings in making agents and workflows easier to use? I don't think your average back office employee is going to be setting up OpenClaw.

They didn't say they think there's no benefit (nor give an opinion the other way), just that that's the benefit that counts for a new tool like this, as opposed to the comparison you suggested.

Feels to me like it's missing a key component of how processes work. If they measure how much time it takes a person to complete a power point and then extrapolate the automation, sure, you can make three years worth of power points in a few weeks, but usually these are made in response to external events of some sort. You're giving a presentation to a customer or a conference. You're briefing internally the results of a study. Whatever it is, no matter how much faster you generate the slide decks, you can't speed up history to give you more stuff to actually put in the slide decks. You can't make the audience read or listen to it any faster. Typing is not the slow part of the critical path here.

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.

I think it’s software, despite the picture, and I think it’s their version of openclaw. Hard to tell.

Perplexity for sure saved / invented years of work.

The typical market research , Google analyze , put into spreadsheet is almost gone job. Imagine how many people were doing that as major part of their work

Demo video shows user asking for a briefing for a board of directors. What's the value of user making such a request? Each board director could ask for a particular thing they require, or a briefing themself, eliminating human intermediary who gatekeeps mouse click for choosing style of a generated text. Considering there is no input from the user into the briefing this interaction is absurd. The tech they show eliminates the need for the actions shown.

Other example is "finding" employees. What's the purpose of a human in the middle? The implied result is contact list for potential employees. Will they write them invitation for the interview by hand?

I'm really confused why is this presented like this. It has this surreal dreamlike quality. Something is done. Emails sent, contacts acquired, profits unlocked, synergy achieved etc.

You are describing products that change the information flow used to solve a problem. There are probably big gains there, but it requires everyone to come for the journey at the same time - for example, you must tell the board "there is no report, talk to this bot. Not everyone will join for the ride!

AI marketers are leaning into use cases where and individually can unilaterally choose to do their work a different way. This is much easier to explain and distribute!

All that said, the result is definitely funny - seeing work done like this makes you realize how artificial the tasks that make up modern work are.

> Each board director could ask for a particular thing they require, or a briefing themself, eliminating human intermediary

You are missing the point of board briefings. The CEO serves as a critical filter of information, deciding what to tell the board and how to frame it. If you take the CEO out of it, you're giving the board full access to the company's state. There's enough going on day-to-day that each member can tell themselves the story they want to believe. The CEO is there to advocate for the company and present a unified front, you can't take them out of the equation.

Isn't the CEO taking themselves out of the equation in this demo?

No, because they are not blindly passing on the briefing to the board. It's a starting point, and presumably they're going to tweak it.

Why would a board refuse to use this tool? Why would a board want to allow the CEO to filter and frame?

Because it opens them up to liability. The most experienced board members will leave the board deck behind so they don’t have a copy. They sure won’t go searching for things that aren’t presented in the board meeting. It’s better for them to blame and fire the CEO.

> 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

We thought we did but we never left the Clippy era did we

> 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?

Is the computer in the room with us right now?

Read: is accessible from wherever you are. The implications being that you're not already carrying your laptop around with you.

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’s going to trust an AI like that? Maybe the Meta Superintelligence safety director.

https://www.fastcompany.com/91497841/meta-superintelligence-...

> 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.

This is that 2024 trope of "the AI is turning my 5 bullet points into a proper email to send." "And my AI is summarising all those long boring emails into bullet points!".

The slide deck won't be viewed by a human. It'll be read by the human's pet LLM and then summarised into 3 bullet points.

We need to cast off the idea that all of our data should be accessible from every device, or that a personal computer is the one hub of all of our data. It's so 90's. It's giving "computer room".

This seems like a good device for working on a single project of well-defined scope. You can give it whatever context it needs by including the relevant data, and no one's asking you to log into your Apple or Google account to go through your private photos. Keep separate things separate.

A few years ago I would not believe that AI would be able to write code better than me. Today I barely write any code, Claude is responsible for 95% of my code output.

Maybe in a couple of iterations, you'd be able to trust the AI to straight up drive your computer with access to all important parts of your digital life most of the time and only occasionally have to manually stop it from wiring all your savings and 401k to a struggling Nigerian prince.

I mean, I would, and I will. There are enough people that will allow this. Just look at the OpenClaw hype. I have also seen a lot of my friends build these type of automations for themselves; or attempt to. Which leads me to believe there is a huge market for.

I think the actual question parent wants to ask is "what kind of business user would ever use that", which is a very different thing from "why would a random Twitter user use and post about it"

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.

OpenClaw as an appliance, ready to use, sold to non-techies? May as well be profitable.

Does openclaw have a killer use yet? Ive not opted to use it yet becauase - while very impressive hype and capability - seems like a lot of risk/credits for not an insane gain.

Does any fashion thing always offer a lot of gain? But it's selling well because it's hot fashion, a talking piece, a sign of belonging to a particular social circle, etc. Perplexity caught the moment very reasonably: a fad should be monetized very quickly, because it's often as quick to fizz out.

I guess my question is there any value or is it merely the thing du jour.

Giving non-technical people agents with custom skills, quickly (like literally in under an hour). We've done a couple similar deployments but with some hard guardrails and it's been a hit.

So is that the use case -- getting non-technical people a leg up?

Yep. Perplexity offers this comparison/recommendation:

Choose Perplexity Computer if you: want a managed, safer, minimal‑setup agent for research, content, presentations, and business workflows, and you’re fine paying a subscription for a polished cloud experience.

Choose OpenClaw if you: are technical, want local code execution and device automation, prefer full control over models/tools, and are willing to own the security and troubleshooting burden.

Productizing openclaw. Seems pretty smart. (But probably going to be commoditized pretty quickly.)

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

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?

They have been receiving a lot of hate on Reddit for a few weeks, since they started mass canceling Pro accounts. What seemed to be initially an attempt at preventing illegitimate accounts (aka those using coupons from grey market for instance) escalated into wavesof random accounts suspensions just for not having a credit card set, including legit ones that came as a package with ISP, bank accounts, etc.

Not only have there been those cancellations, but they’ve also been cutting back features in a lot of areas, especially in the Pro tier, and doing it pretty drastically without any notice. Honestly, I think that might be the bigger issue, particularly since many of the affected users are paying customers, and quite a few of them paid for a full year upfront.

Yes, this is a very poor way of handling the issue. It's not like those 1 year vouchers have been stollen from them, they have been handing those out like candies and now they realized it wasn't profitable, they back off without any consideration for their customers.

It's been pointed out on Reddit that this move was not even legal in most EU because they have not been able to point out which of their ToC has been infringed (their official motive for cancellation). I am tired of companies behaving like cowboys...

Oh, so I wasn't the only one to lose my pro subscription all of sudden. I thought it was weird because it was supposed to expire this summer, not now.

When better standalone LLMs got "web crawling skills" integrated, it pretty much destroyed the need to ever lean on PPLX again. Perplexity is actually not a bad product, but other services like ChatGPT and Claude can do it's best thing pretty good, and do other things much better.

One thing I noticed is that whatever harness PPLX wraps around the models, the output is noticeably lower quality in aggregate. I assume some kind of token compression being used before passing your query to a given model but to my knowledge that's never been proven or confirmed?

Anyways, I get the most value out of coding and PPLX has seemingly pivoted away from that. Probably a good play to not try and compete directly with Claude Code/Codex and find a better niche, but I am not sure who or what their market is. Lovely design, however.

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.

Oh yeah, that is funny. Thanks for adding it; I thought I was missing at least one major one!

- Copilot: Great at finding and discussing docs, conversations, and other work items that it is connected to. For everything else, it seems somehow less smart than the others (YMMV).

Emphasis on the YMMV, obviously. Maybe my impression is colored by a small number of unlucky, less than stellar experiences (comparatively speaking).

It took me a while to understand what this is, but if I understand it right it's a OpenClaw you can run on your Mac Mini, to then use through the Perplexity Computer interface (which is their hosted OpenClaw version that you costs credits)

So a more polished OpenClaw that integrates with Perplexity?

In general interesting, if it's not just limited to Mac Minis. Would love to put this on my VPS that's currently running OpenClaw

None of these companies are serious businesses. They are either researchers out of their depth in transforming their work into economically stable products or they are inept CEO scammers pretending that how you sell something is more important than what you sell.

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".

It does seem especially similar to old Mac ad fonts

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.

Serifs are so back and I'm so excited.

The specific font here is clearly meant to reference the marketing for the original Macintosh.

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

> The computer still computes. But now, for the first time, the computer lives with you.

No, it doesn't, because it's not alive.

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

underrated comment haha. made my day

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

> 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.

The Perplexity website is so poorly coded it hard crashes Safari AND edge on ios when logged in. Still can’t open the edge app but I managed to get back in on safari.

It’s been 2 months.

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?

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?

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...

Does anyone else get a problem with perplexity where its pages get completely frozen/unresponsive until you close the tab and reopen it? And most of the time the issue comes back in just a few seconds. This seems to happen if one opens more than 1 tab with perplexity in parallel.

Works perfectly on my machine!

This seems odd. I think broadly there are two ways of structuring how you interact with AI agents:

* The first is where there's you and your computer, and you're doing pre-AI work. You hit some hotkey and pass off some task to AI.

* The second - and where I think we should probably be going, is there's you and you interact with the an agent. You aren't handing the Q4 report off to the agent, the agent is bringing the Q4 report to you.

I think the first scenario is trying to pry agentic work into legacy workflows. It will be more powerful when we simply go straight to the second, where orchestration and interaction with your agents is the interface.

Most perplexing product description I’ve read in some time from a major company

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?

Is this an openclaw alternative that is installed on my mac but runs on their cloud? Or just a VDI?

It's difficult to understand what this is because its name is "Personal Computer", and it seems like their definition of Personal Computer is very different from everyone else's.

Also it's funny that it shows making a revenue report with their brand template. AI can replace HR jobs but they still have to make reports for noble executives? They are basically saying "We won't replace CEOs/executives".

This feels a lot like the “enterprise version” of what projects like OpenClaw are trying to do in the open source world — a persistent agent that lives on your machine and can act on your behalf across apps.

If Perplexity ships this successfully, I suspect it could push the whole space forward. Once a big company normalizes the idea of an always-on agent with OS-level access, we’ll probably see a lot more companies building similar “AI computer” layers on top of existing systems.

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

read it and have no idea what it does

I think it's an LLM wrapper.

it spies. everything.

Why does it have to be a Mac Mini? I use a repurposed HP Elitedesk 800 Mini from a decade ago for OpenClaw and it works just fine. Cost me maybe $50 US.

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.

The rich kids used to want to be rockstars, now they all want to be entrepreneurs.

Back when work was work and we had festivals.

It's what grads do after school - create an AI startup.

If you went to the right school, you can be a Series A company with nothing more than an OPENAI_API_KEY. Most of the young and inexperienced founders mentally retire at this point and start their family planning.

There were a few cities like "Austin", but now I guess it's just SF and NY again (I'm in SF).

The students get what they paid for.

The school gets their metrics.

The VCs get returns, from the increased revenue their portfolios just paid for by investing in their kid's startup.

And the wheel in the sky keeps on turnin!

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?

The entire screen is covered by a video which just renders:

> Watch video on YouTube > Error 153 > Video player configuration error

On Firefox/Linux or Safari/iOS.

How is it that this kind of organisation can't properly embed a video player or make a working landing page?

Perplexity.ai 's main login-less search/chatbot is my personal favorite online LLM.

I would be willing to try this new product of theirs, but definitely on a secondary computer (i.e. not main system).

Do I have to sign up to install their version of an OS/openclaw?

Yes i think you need MAX subscription.

>Personal Computer

>Depends on our SaaS

Pick one.

Impersonal Confuser is what it really is

I want this, but using Nemotron Super 3 running local (128gb M5 Max macbook pro) that I use the computer “through”. Does Goose AI aspire/do this? I just started working on this yesterday.

Curious if this page is weirdly cropped on the sides for anyone else?

I hope it doesn't require a Mac mini. I like my openclaw but would be interesting to see what a polished commercial product looks like.

So Perplexity's openclaw? Hopefully more secure?

> So Perplexity's openclaw? Hopefully more secure?

Given the inherent unpredictability of LLMs, I'm not convinced that an openclaw-like system but with more security features bolted on top is really a positive in the sense that the false sense of absolute security probably outweighs whatever actual security has been added.

It is easier to understand that openclaw is definitely insecure.

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

dwfsdfdsfdsfdsfds

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

I’m not sure i understand this, is this some kind of corporate openclaw?

Am I misreading or is it Anthropic’s OpenClaw?

OpenClaw really was Pandora's Box

It's giving ensloppification

hell no

I don't think I'm cut out for the modern world

There's another trending HN thread talking about a similar product but cloud based going by the name of Klaus: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47337249

whole lot of noise, alots more problems

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.

> always-on, local access to your machine's files, apps, and sessions

Uh... how about..., no...? What?

> Controllable from any device, anywhere

...

> There is a kill switch

Oh great, sounds like you're confident this is safe then!

Someone wake me up, please

I hate this generic item naming style in tech so fucking much.

it’s not ZIRP anymore but it might as well be. you can truly get funded to make anything right now

It's not ZIRP, it's FLOMA.

> "But now, for the first time, the computer lives with you."

Hasn't this been true since, like, the late 70s?

Typical marketing sentence that means nothing (talking about the article, not you).

Sounds terrible. Seems like Perplexity is desperate to appear innovative but doesn’t know how.

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.

this is such disappointing clickbait. i thought it was a hardware product.

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

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.

No that’s for people.

Wake me up when September ends.

“Personal Computer”

“The Browser Company”

What’s next “Car, by Ford”

Brand-wise it’s like those cheap dishes at Ross that have the word of what it’s for, like a tea cup that just says “Sip” or a jar with the word “Tea”.

I hate it!

AI brands should cut to the chase, something edgy like “Villain” or “Blackbox”

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

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