Perplexity’s buzzy new ‘Computer’ super agent wasn’t in the product plans until recently. It emerged from breakthroughs in frontier AI models in December, Chief Business Officer Dmitry Shevelenko told Semafor.
After Perplexity spent six months building its browser product Comet, it made Computer in two months. While the products aren’t a one-for-one comparison — browsers have their own set of complexities — Computer is a testament to a new sense of ease that AI has brought to building products and to the breakneck speed of development shaking the industries and the AI companies themselves.
“Six months from now, I’m going to have a top-three priority that today I don’t know about,” Shevelenko told Semafor. “Only the paranoid survive.”
Perplexity engineers spent the first month building Computer on Claude Code, and then employees used the tool itself to bring it to the finish line: Computer helped animate its own logo, modify its code, and develop its go-to-market strategy, Shevelenko said. When Computer went live, it was Perplexity’s biggest revenue-generating day in history.