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Personal Computer by Perplexity

perplexity.ai

131–140 of 187 posts

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#131
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.

In an organization, the number of sequential steps doesn't really scale with number of participants, does it? Rather with dependent steps of the tackled process; say, devise building permit request, await approval, purchase materials, move materials to site, hire workforce, etc.

Theoretically, each of those steps is parallelizable to some extent. Amdahl's law equivalent here would be that some delays are outside the reach of an organization to improve. For instance, a building permit will take the time it takes to be examined based on an external public administration.

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#132

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…

I see how this can boost productivity...for those that today already produce value voluntarily. These will move one level higher. The rest with 100x the amount of performative work. Everyone will be busier created presentations and charts that no one needs and no one will read. Managers will ask for new presentations and reports every sync, and hours will be spent discussing things that don't actually matter.

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#133

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.co…

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"

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comparing to pre-chatgpt workflows makes for useless statements I want to know pre-"personal computer by perplexity"

You don't think there's cost/labor savings in making agents and workflows easier to use? I don't think your average back office employee is going to be setting up OpenClaw.

They didn't say they think there's no benefit (nor give an opinion the other way), just that that's the benefit that counts for a new tool like this, as opposed to the comparison you suggested.

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#136

> 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.

Is the computer in the room with us right now?

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#138

> 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.

Is the computer in the room with us right now?

[deleted]

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#139
This feels a lot like the “enterprise version” of what projects like OpenClaw are trying to do in the open source world — a persistent agent that lives on your machine and can act on your behalf across apps.

If Perplexity ships this successfully, I suspect it could push the whole space forward. Once a big company normalizes the idea of an always-on agent with OS-level access, we’ll probably see a lot more companies building similar “AI computer” layers on top of existing systems.

Re: Personal Computer by Perplexity

#140
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 leg…

Why would you make a presentation? send me the data and ill ask my own AI to do it in my favorite silly voice.

Bingo!
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