Perplexity launches agentic AI platform
Perplexity has launched "Perplexity Computer," a new platform described as an agentic system for end-to-end project orchestration. The platform is designed to handle complex tasks from research and coding to deployment. The launch signals a broader industry shift from conversational AI chatbots toward more autonomous, task-oriented AI agents.
- Perplexity AI was founded in August 2022 by a team with backgrounds at Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Databricks. The company has raised a total of $1.22 billion and reached a valuation of $20 billion by September 2025, with investors including Jeff Bezos and Nvidia. - The "Perplexity Computer" platform is a multi-model orchestration engine that utilizes 19 different AI models, assigning each sub-task to the best model for the job. It uses Claude Opus 4.6 for core reasoning and routes other tasks to models like Gemini, ChatGPT 5.2, and Veo 3.1 for video. - Unlike a chatbot, the platform operates by decomposing a user's goal into a series of subtasks and then autonomously executes them by chaining together tools like web browsing, API calls, and file manipulation within a sandboxed environment. - The launch is part of a broader industry trend of enterprises moving from simple question-answering AI to agentic architectures that can handle multi-step, autonomous workflows. One report indicates a 327% growth in the use of multi-agent workflows in enterprise environments. - This system competes within an ecosystem of agentic frameworks that includes high-abstraction, role-based platforms like CrewAI and more developer-controlled, graph-based systems like LangGraph. - Co-founder and CEO Aravind Srinivas previously worked as a research scientist at OpenAI and Google after earning a PhD from UC Berkeley. In 2020, he co-taught a course at Berkeley on deep unsupervised learning, focusing on generative AI before it was a mainstream term. - The enterprise agentic AI market was valued at $2.58 billion in 2024 and is forecasted to grow to $24.50 billion by 2030, with a compound annual growth rate of 46.2%. - Access to Perplexity Computer is provided through the company's Perplexity Pro subscription, priced at $20 per month, making agentic capabilities available to individual developers rather than just large enterprise clients.
