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 legit or not, but these tools are not just clicking links in 2026.

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!

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.

"There are decades where nothing happens and weeks where decades happen."

Could they have even trained the models 25 years ago? Wikipedia was nothing close to what it is today and I know folks here like to mourn the fall of the open web, but it's still orders of magnitude larger today than it was in 2001. YouTube, so many information stores that simply didn't exist then.

Maybe not 25,but IBM Watson beat humans at Jeopardy over 10 years ago. The technology has been there, the difference is the willingness to burn money on it in hopes of capturing exponential revenue from disrupting industries.

Obviously the costs have come down but if IBM felt like burning 100 Billion in 2012 I'm pretty sure they could have a similarly impressive chat bot. Just not sure how they would have ever recouped the revenue.

Nah, IBM watson jeopardy version was a one-off. It was an app specifically tuned for that usecase. IBM Watson is not a single product or app. It is more of a marketing term

The book archives are a big one as well, all the journals that have been published digitally throughout the 2000s, and all the newspapers.

Though with some types of models (specifically voice) it has been discovered that a smaller high quality dataset is better than a giant dataset filled with errors.

I'm not sure if the price rose later, but I remember getting Dark Sky for a $3.99 one-time payment. Much more palatable than $25/year imo.

think it was pay once on iOS and the android dark sky app that came out later was $3/year. So like 733% increase.

I can't speak to the typos, but launching first for MacOS not something new for OpenAI. They did the same with their dedicated desktop client.

Same. And indeed, it's here. The genie is not going back into the bottle, so we have to learn how to live in this new world.

Eric Schmidt has spoken a lot recently about how it's one of the biggest advances in human history and it's hard to disagree with him, even if some aspects make me anxious.

One of the biggest advances in human history, and yet the owners of the technology with access to an unlimited number of "agents" using frontier models still can't release a desktop chat application without using Electron to bring in several hundred mb of bloat for displaying text. Someone's going to have to explain this one to me because the math is not mathing.

Exactly. If AI really worked, they would've released a native app. And it wouldn't take much to also get a Windows and a Linux native app, wouldn't it?

Apparently, the Codex app itself is proof that AI is not that good at doing what people think it does.

How come if I download code from GitHub, rename some stuff, and republish it under another license I’m a bad guy, but if I ask ChatGFY to do it for me I’m a 10x Chad? … someone is gonna figure that part out in court. I remember what code SCO used to make hay, and I know what side the MPAA, RIAA, Google, and NVidia Are gonna be on at the end of the day.

Replacing workers with things you can’t beat, sue, intimidate, or cajole? Someone is gonna do something to make that not cool in MBA land. I think if one of my employees LL-MessedUp something, and I were upset, watching that same person stealing my money haplessly turn to an LLM for help might land me in jail.

I kinda love LLMs, I’ve always struggled to write emails without calling people names. There’s some clear coding tooling utility. But some of this current hype wave is insano-balls from a business perspective. Pets.com X here’s-my-ssh-keys. Just wild.

I appreciate your honest testimonial. It's so rare these days to read a sentence like, "No credit to me at all" haha

Appreciate everyone adding links to their suggestions!

Kind of a key point in that – the whole purchasing stolen information thing.

Yeah that was either a tactical misstep, or a smart move if they fabricated the date or the fact that they put in in their two weeks.

Of course they did. You dont use a burner laptop then drop PII in the post.

They may also not work for the company and just larp as a combo of stories they heard, or it is all made up for karma or kicks.