The News
Each time an AI company launches a category-killer product, it poses dangers to another swath of stocks and sectors. This is no different, though the buzziest news of late has been less about how good the actual product is and more about the propensity to fuel people’s fears — and stoke their hopes — about what is still coming.
Perplexity launched a new product on Wednesday with an old name — “Computer” — that acts as a super agent that can create a website, write a report, or generate a dataset. It’s like the next level of vibe coding — all the user has to do is describe the end-product they want and Computer breaks down the assignment for task-specific sub-agents to do the work from start to finish. It even chooses the best model for the specific job, outsourcing to Nano Banana for images, Veo 3.1 for video, Gemini for deep research, and Grok for quick searches. It runs autonomously for hours, or even months, according to the company.
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Rachyl’s view
The idea to package and refine existing technologies in a way users will pay for is a smart one — Computer is the kind of product that the tech industry has been talking about for the last year but hasn’t yet been developed in a way that lives up to the hype. Most everyday users don’t really care which software they’re using, they just want to do cool things quickly.
The big risk for Perplexity, however, is if the models themselves become commodities, rendering useless a service that allows users to switch between the AIs for tasks.
Room for Disagreement
Perplexity’s basic product repackaging has also created a big problem for the company, with several copyright lawsuits pending against it. “The situation ultimately poses a threat to the AI companies themselves,” lawyers told Bloomberg.