> 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.
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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]
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.
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"
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
Readit News
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 lingering question is if the intermediate LLM translation steps will actually make our communication more efficient - or just amplify the already inefficient parts.
Deleted Comment
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.
send me the data and ill ask my own AI to do it in my favorite silly voice.
I want to know pre-"personal computer by perplexity"
I think their numbers of $1.6M and 3.25 years is still probably a massive overestimate, but the order of magnitude seems plausible.
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
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.
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 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.
But they want you to think of it as alive. They're anthropomorphizing it.
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?
Deleted Comment
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/
https://www.fastcompany.com/91497841/meta-superintelligence-...
… 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.
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.
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.
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.
>Personal Computer runs on a dedicated Mac mini that can run 24/7, connected to your local apps and Perplexity’s secure servers.
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.
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.
- 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.
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
Also this "system" just seems vulnerable af.
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.
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".
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.