...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.

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.

>Personal Computer runs on a dedicated Mac mini that can run 24/7, connected to your local apps and Perplexity’s secure servers.

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.

Also this "system" just seems vulnerable af.

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/

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

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

It’s been 2 months.

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.

* 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.

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?

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

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.

- 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.

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/everything-is-computer

They designed a program (copied OpenClaw) and called it a computer

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 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.

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

… 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.

https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9fza3s

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.