Perplexity Computer
Perplexity’s recent announcement is pretty interesting.
Perplexity Computer is effectively a mega front-end sitting over the top of all of its competitors’ foundation models. It allows a user to delegate an extremely complex task to AI that can take hours or even up to days to execute.
It’s actually pretty smart. The other consumer-facing AI assistants (Claude, Gemini, ChatGPT) are largely constrained to using their own models for everything. That means they struggle to benefit from each other’s capabilities and bring that to bear for the end user.
Perplexity’s bet is that owning the end user relationship with an orchestration layer that makes the complexity of the AI landscape navigable is where the value will ultimately accrue.
The obvious problem is that reselling other people’s models is expensive and fraught with platform risk, but again (in theory) the ability to trade off between multiple underlying providers can mitigate this.
It’s about the best possible strategic move from a company whose prospects were looking increasingly dim as the foundation model companies encroached on the user application opportunity (with, to be fair, pretty excellent products). Good luck to them.