Perplexity’s new Computer is another bet that users need many AI models
Starting this week, Perplexity subscribers will have a new agentic tool at their disposal. Perplexity Computer, in the company’s words, “unifies every current AI capability into a single system.” More specifically, Perplexity says it is a computer user agent that can execute complex workflows independently using 19 different AI models, even creating subagents to handle specific problems. The tool is available now, only on the company’s highest subscription tier, the $200/month Perplexity Max. It runs entirely in the cloud, which might spare it some of the security concerns of other agentic tools like OpenClaw. TechCrunch hasn’t done a hands-on demo of the new tool, but inexample workflowson Perplexity’s website, it is shown handling tasks that involve collecting statistics, financial, or legal data; creating analysis; and sharing its findings as finished websites or visualizations. Perplexity invited the press to a background briefing with executives last week to discuss the product and lay out the agenda for the year. The event was intended to include a demonstration of the tool, but the company cancelled the demo because of flaws found in the product hours before the event. This tool represents the evolution of Perplexity, which made a splash early in the AI boom by wrapping frontier models in familiar user interfaces, particularly its search-engine-like answer service. It then moved on to launch its Comet web browser last summer. Competitors like Google have now changed their products to be more like those built at Perplexity, one executive said, but that’s a threat as much as a compliment. The company is changing in response to a shifting ecosystem: One of the first AI companies to offer advertising, it abandoned that business late last year, saying last week that it undermined users’ trust in their answers’ accuracy. But Perplexity’s total user base—in the tens of millions of users—pales in comparison to that of OpenAI, which claims 800 million weekly users and began testing ads in ChatGPT this year. Now, Perplexity executives say they are aiming for a more boutique set of users, with products that serve people making “GDP-moving decisions.” Executives in the briefing, who asked not to be identified by name, described prioritizing enterprise subscriptions, particularly for deep research. “You don’t hear us talk about MAUs ever, because we’re not actually on a mission to get as many users as possible,” one executive said. Perplexity recently released a new benchmark for complex research tasks, called Draco, where (no surprise) its own deep research offering beats out competitors like Gemini. Perplexity says it is no longer reliant on other companies’ APIs for its web index and now has its own AI-optimized search API. But the company is doubling down on packaging frontier models in a consumer-friendly user experience, arguing that there is value in orchestrating multiple third-party LLMs to obtain the most cost-effective and accurate answers to queries. “Multi-model is the future,” one Perplexity exec argued. Models, in their view, are specializing, not commoditizing. The company has found that its users frequently switch between models to obtain the results they are looking for, with December 2025 queries for visual outputs most often sent to Gemini Flash, software engineering done by Claude Sonnet 4.5, and medical research in GPT-5.1. If one LLM is better at coding tasks and another does a better job drafting marketing copy, Perplexity’s software can automatically choose the ideal one. Another example, executives said, is running Perplexity’s own modified open-source Chinese-built LLMs to answer queries more cheaply, a technique the company got dinged for hiding from its customers last year. But done transparently, the technique could prove an efficient way to optimize LLM queries. The company also offers users the opportunity to query multiple models at once, in a feature called Model Council. But the unit economics of offering multiple queries at flat subscription rates aren’t entirely clear. Still, without expensive infrastructure projects on its books and with, the executives claimed, high margins on users fees, Perplexity believes it will remain competitive by allocating tokens to the best model for a purpose. And there is more coming: Perplexity Comet browser is coming to iOS next month, and the company is planning a developers’ conference, Ask, on March 11 in San Francisco to promote third-party use of its API. One executive said that instead of looking at the previous day’s number of queries each morning, he was now looking at the most recent revenue metrics. At least some customers are noticing a new focus on the bottom line, with the Perplexity subreddit featuring frequent complaints of new rate limits on free and subscription product tiers. However, the execs at the briefing dismisses such complaints. “Any discussions on the free tier being made worse or rate-limited is completely false,” an executive said.
