[HN Gopher] Personal Computer by Perplexity
___________________________________________________________________
Personal Computer by Perplexity
Author : josephwegner
Score : 200 points
Date : 2026-03-11 18:22 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.perplexity.ai)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.perplexity.ai)
| dakial1 wrote:
| So Perplexity's openclaw? Hopefully more secure?
| georgemcbay wrote:
| > 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.
| gtowey wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| 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.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Oh no, April Fool's Day is going to be tremendously awful this
| year, isn't it
| ch4s3 wrote:
| It's been perpetual April 1st since November 30th, 2022.
| fragmede wrote:
| September, surely.
| ch4s3 wrote:
| No that's for people.
| aspenmayer wrote:
| Wake me up when September ends.
| recursive wrote:
| > 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.
| moritzwarhier wrote:
| > 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?
| thedanbob wrote:
| > What does this mean? The computer isn't alive.
|
| But they want you to think of it as alive. They're
| anthropomorphizing it.
| recursive wrote:
| 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_
| superultra wrote:
| We thought we did but we never left the Clippy era did we
| rpastuszak wrote:
| Is the computer in the room with us right now?
| vidarh wrote:
| Read: is accessible from wherever you are. The implications
| being that you're not already carrying your laptop around with
| you.
| d--b wrote:
| OH so that's why it's called Perplexity!
| QQ00 wrote:
| Openclaw + Microsoft Recall = Personal computer by perplexity. At
| least this is my interpretation from reading that web page.
| jkestner wrote:
| Sneaky use of an almost Garamond, but the copy ain't Chiat\Day.
| password54321 wrote:
| No moat. If you rely on OpenAI / Google / Anthropic you are
| doomed.
| chrismarlow9 wrote:
| Do you feel the same about AWS?
| paxys wrote:
| Which side are you implying AWS is on?
| horsawlarway wrote:
| 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.
| hsuduebc2 wrote:
| 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...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Blog post: https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/everything-is-
| computer
| echoangle wrote:
| Is that a reference to Trump in the Tesla?
|
| https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9fza3s
| par wrote:
| read it and have no idea what it does
| cedws wrote:
| I think it's an LLM wrapper.
| weezing wrote:
| it spies. everything.
| gensym wrote:
| Zombo.com
| viksit wrote:
| underrated comment haha. made my day
| seeingnature wrote:
| 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
| claysmithr wrote:
| Wow they designed a computer I don't want
| ncr100 wrote:
| Say more?
| Zambyte wrote:
| > 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
| neal_jones wrote:
| 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
| bisonbear wrote:
| sounds like it's another openclaw-as-a-service provider?
| paxys wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| w4der wrote:
| 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.
| LollipopYakuza wrote:
| 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.
| unsignedint wrote:
| 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.
| LollipopYakuza wrote:
| 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...
| Alifatisk wrote:
| 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.
| hbosch wrote:
| 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.
| paxys wrote:
| TL;DR - Perplexity-branded OpenClaw
| eitally wrote:
| Ten years ago I would have thought this was an excellent April
| Fool's Day launch. Now I just think it's foolish.
| tartoran wrote:
| 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?
| SirensOfTitan wrote:
| 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.
| ryandrake wrote:
| 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.
| jcims wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Surely a highly innovative product that will sell in high
| volumes /s
| gizajob wrote:
| Ohhh so it's just openclaw. Innovative.
| nine_k wrote:
| OpenClaw as an appliance, ready to use, sold to non-techies?
| May as well be profitable.
| boringg wrote:
| 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| 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.
| boringg wrote:
| I guess my question is there any value or is it merely
| the thing du jour.
| nkotov wrote:
| 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.
| boringg wrote:
| So is that the use case -- getting non-technical people a
| leg up?
| sanderjd wrote:
| Productizing openclaw. Seems pretty smart. (But probably
| going to be commoditized pretty quickly.)
| Tempest1981 wrote:
| 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.
| skyberrys wrote:
| 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?
| g-b-r wrote:
| Mac Mini connected to their "secure servers", so of course it's
| the opposite of the claimed local and private...
| irusensei wrote:
| >Personal Computer
|
| >Depends on our SaaS
|
| Pick one.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| > 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.
| Avicebron wrote:
| > 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.
| nine_k wrote:
| >> _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.)
| pembrook wrote:
| 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.
| _pdp_ wrote:
| 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.
| pembrook wrote:
| 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)
| _pdp_ wrote:
| 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.
| pembrook wrote:
| 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.
| Nevermark wrote:
| 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.
| MITSardine wrote:
| 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.
| amirhirsch wrote:
| Critically, Amdahl's Law remains a conjecture until we
| have the maths to disjoin complexity class P from NC.
| keeda wrote:
| Yep, I call this the "Conway Overhead":
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47270142
| wolvoleo wrote:
| This is so true. I can see the same in our organisation.
| So much time wasted on bullshit busywork and red tape.
| anonzzzies wrote:
| 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.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| This is such a broad generalization it is easy to
| dismiss.
| uoaei wrote:
| Yours is such an unspecific criticism it's impossible to
| take seriously.
| Esophagus4 wrote:
| I guess we're at a stalemate, then.
| resonious wrote:
| Completely agreed. The thought that "people emailing each
| other" is a problem that should be "automated" away is
| delusional.
| jazzpush2 wrote:
| I have several friends at the big 4 who work ~2 hour weeks.
| ornornor wrote:
| 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.
| psjs wrote:
| 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
| sally_glance wrote:
| 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.
| pdfernhout wrote:
| 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."
| sally_glance wrote:
| 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).
| wongarsu wrote:
| 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
| sally_glance wrote:
| 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.
| figassis wrote:
| 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.
| jfengel wrote:
| 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.
| hatthew wrote:
| 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.
| deepfriedbits wrote:
| 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.
| SebastianSosa1 wrote:
| Comparing to pre-chatgpt workflows makes for useless
| statements
|
| I want to know pre-"personal computer by perplexity"
| deepfriedbits wrote:
| 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.
| swores wrote:
| 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.
| tekno45 wrote:
| Why would you make a presentation?
|
| send me the data and ill ask my own AI to do it in my
| favorite silly voice.
| gmerc wrote:
| Bingo!
| wetoastfood wrote:
| 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.
| maxdo wrote:
| 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
| makerofthings wrote:
| I think it's software, despite the picture, and I think it's
| their version of openclaw. Hard to tell.
| d1sxeyes wrote:
| 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.
| wink wrote:
| Copy Pasting World Champion 2026
| uoaei wrote:
| So they ask people to self-report for control, then measure
| actual time for treatment? Holy scientific methodology,
| Batman.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| 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.
| mhitza wrote:
| 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.
| suobset wrote:
| 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.
| bee_rider wrote:
| 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.
| suobset wrote:
| 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".
| bee_rider wrote:
| It does seem especially similar to old Mac ad fonts
| ang_cire wrote:
| 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.
| month13 wrote:
| Serifs are so back and I'm so excited.
| ghostly_s wrote:
| The specific font here is clearly meant to reference the
| marketing for the original Macintosh.
| d_silin wrote:
| It is an OS with AI chat interface, as far as I can understand.
| g-b-r wrote:
| Yes, they sure made their own OS
| maxaw wrote:
| Most perplexing product description I've read in some time from a
| major company
| mikewarot wrote:
| 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/
| treetalker wrote:
| > 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.
| marcus_holmes wrote:
| 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.
| dhosek wrote:
| Who's going to trust an AI like that? Maybe the Meta
| Superintelligence safety director.
|
| https://www.fastcompany.com/91497841/meta-superintelligence-...
| bloody-crow wrote:
| 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.
| fbrncci wrote:
| 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.
| g947o wrote:
| 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"
| uoaei wrote:
| 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.
| microsoftedging wrote:
| > The computer still computes. But now, for the first time, the
| computer lives with you.
|
| No, it doesn't, because it's not alive.
| nlpart11 wrote:
| 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?
| znpy wrote:
| I'm not sure i understand this, is this some kind of corporate
| openclaw?
| nxtfari wrote:
| it's not ZIRP anymore but it might as well be. you can truly get
| funded to make anything right now
| imcritic wrote:
| It's not ZIRP, it's FLOMA.
| anon115 wrote:
| whole lot of noise, alots more problems
| brtkwr wrote:
| 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
| ArchieScrivener wrote:
| 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.
| dogmatism wrote:
| hell no
|
| I don't think I'm cut out for the modern world
| ProllyInfamous wrote:
| 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?
| dddw wrote:
| Yes i think you need MAX subscription.
| plastic041 wrote:
| 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".
| imcritic wrote:
| 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.
| prab97 wrote:
| Works perfectly on my machine!
| waldothedog wrote:
| Curious if this page is weirdly cropped on the sides for anyone
| else?
| artdigital wrote:
| 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
| nice_byte wrote:
| this is such disappointing clickbait. i thought it was a hardware
| product.
| redgridtactical wrote:
| OpenClaw really was Pandora's Box
| dcre wrote:
| Sounds terrible. Seems like Perplexity is desperate to appear
| innovative but doesn't know how.
| WhyNotHugo wrote:
| 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?
| ornornor wrote:
| Am I misreading or is it Anthropic's OpenClaw?
| carabiner wrote:
| I hate this generic item naming style in tech so fucking much.
| DrAwdeOccarim wrote:
| 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.
| idorozin wrote:
| 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.
| undefeated wrote:
| > 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
| brador wrote:
| 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.
| hau wrote:
| 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.
| evrydayhustling wrote:
| 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.
| phailhaus wrote:
| > 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.
| gpderetta wrote:
| Isn't the CEO taking themselves out of the equation in this
| demo?
| phailhaus wrote:
| 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.
| gowld wrote:
| Why would a board refuse to use this tool? Why would a board
| want to allow the CEO to filter and frame?
| caseyf7 wrote:
| 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.
| voidUpdate wrote:
| > "But now, for the first time, the computer lives with you."
|
| Hasn't this been true since, like, the late 70s?
| robinhood wrote:
| Typical marketing sentence that means nothing (talking about
| the article, not you).
| mycodendral wrote:
| It's giving ensloppification
| sanex wrote:
| 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.
| Traster wrote:
| 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.
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