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