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Personal Computer by Perplexity

142 pointsby josephwegneryesterday at 6:22 PM116 commentsview on HN

Comments

_pdp_yesterday at 10:26 PM

> 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.

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recursiveyesterday at 8:46 PM

> 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.

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mikewarotyesterday at 11:02 PM

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/

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jcimsyesterday at 10:16 PM

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.

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aaronbrethorstyesterday at 8:33 PM

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

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artdigitaltoday at 2:39 AM

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

ArchieScrivenertoday at 12:38 AM

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.

WhyNotHugotoday at 5:33 AM

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?

ornornortoday at 6:29 AM

Am I misreading or is it Anthropic’s OpenClaw?

suobsetyesterday at 10:35 PM

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.

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paxysyesterday at 10:07 PM

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?

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QQ00yesterday at 9:04 PM

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

password54321yesterday at 9:06 PM

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

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gensymyesterday at 9:46 PM

Zombo.com

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SirensOfTitanyesterday at 10:12 PM

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.

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plastic041today at 1:14 AM

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".

skyberrysyesterday at 10:16 PM

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?

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claysmithryesterday at 9:48 PM

Wow they designed a computer I don’t want

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imcritictoday at 1:39 AM

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.

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gtoweyyesterday at 8:18 PM

> 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.

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paryesterday at 9:45 PM

read it and have no idea what it does

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jkestneryesterday at 9:05 PM

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

ProllyInfamoustoday at 12:41 AM

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?

microsoftedgingyesterday at 11:03 PM

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

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

tartoranyesterday at 10:11 PM

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?

redgridtacticaltoday at 5:11 AM

OpenClaw really was Pandora's Box

nlpart11yesterday at 11:07 PM

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?

maxawyesterday at 10:54 PM

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

waldothedogtoday at 2:33 AM

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

irusenseiyesterday at 10:25 PM

>Personal Computer

>Depends on our SaaS

Pick one.

eitallyyesterday at 10:10 PM

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

dakial1yesterday at 7:35 PM

So Perplexity's openclaw? Hopefully more secure?

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dcretoday at 5:24 AM

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

nxtfariyesterday at 11:30 PM

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

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dogmatismtoday at 12:39 AM

hell no

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

brtkwrtoday at 12:26 AM

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

anon115yesterday at 11:57 PM

whole lot of noise, alots more problems

mhitzayesterday at 10:26 PM

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.

znpyyesterday at 11:11 PM

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

d--byesterday at 9:04 PM

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

bisonbearyesterday at 9:58 PM

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

nice_bytetoday at 3:30 AM

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

paxysyesterday at 10:09 PM

TL;DR - Perplexity-branded OpenClaw

HumanOstrichyesterday at 8:33 PM

Stop posting AI slop, especially slop pull requests like the one you made to OpenClaw. Learn the first thing about a project you want to monetize and make fake contributions to. For example, OpenClaw is overwhelmed with slop PRs and the author has talked about this a lot.

d_silinyesterday at 10:39 PM

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

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