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Personal Computer by Perplexity

perplexity.ai

101–110 of 187 posts

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#101
post #36

> 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?…

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.

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

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…

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."

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#103
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".

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 industr…

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).

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#105
post #36

> 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?…

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

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#106
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.

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#107
post #25

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?

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.

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#109

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.

Works perfectly on my machine!

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#110
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 afte…

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.

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.

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