Tech
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 in example workflows on 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 canceled 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.
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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 in 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 user fees, Perplexity believes it will remain competitive by allocating tokens to the best model for a purpose.
And there is more on the horizon: 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 dismiss such complaints: “Any discussions on the free tier being made worse or rate-limited is completely false,” one said.
Tech
Nonprofit Current AI is racing to build the World Wide Web of AI, free for all
A farmer in rural India takes a photo of a dying plant. She wants to research it on the internet but she doesn’t speak English. She shouldn’t have to.
That’s the type of problem a nonprofit called Current AI is trying to solve by building open, public AI infrastructure. In February at the India AI Summit, it teamed up with Bhashini, the Indian government’s AI language division. The result became Suno Sutra, Hindi for “listening chronicles,” a pocket-sized, offline device that runs AI in 22 Indian languages, no internet required. “In India, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, and right now AI is not representing them,” Current AI CEO Ayah Bdeir said in an interview with TechCrunch. The device is open-sourced, available for developer communities to build on.
The nonprofit, founded in February 2025 by Martin Tisne, is moving fast. Last month, it allocated $3.2 million in grants to projects across four organizations; most recently (last week) it launched an open-source AI chatbot at the AI for Good Summit in Geneva.
Bdeir, joined in January after leading Mozilla’s AI strategy. She previously founded littleBits, the STEM education company that reached millions of kids before selling to Sphero in 2019.
Current AI operates as a “public-private partnership” bringing together governments, companies, and philanthropies to fund public interest tech, she told TechCrunch. The French government seeded Current AI with $100 million, joined by the Ford Foundation, MacArthur Foundation, DeepMind, and Salesforce — bringing total committed funding to $400 million. “They’re not investors; they’re funders,” Bdeir said.
The problem it aims to solve is straightforward: every major AI system today, from OpenAI to Google to Anthropic, belongs to a private company. “If AI is truly a transformative technology, if it’s going to change every aspect of everyone’s life, there has to be a public alternative,” Bdeir said. “Like the World Wide Web, available to anyone, for free.”
Half the world’s spoken languages face extinction. “And with English driving the largest language models and AI systems, a bulk of the world’s languages and, consequently, cultures and communities are left behind,” Bdeir said.
When asked about Big Tech’s multilingual push, Bdeir drew a sharp distinction. “Big tech builds multilingual models to expand their market,” she said, “regardless of consent or context.” The consequences are concrete. “For Indigenous languages, missionary Bible translations become training data before communities have set any rules,” she said.
Not just about language
An AI’s ability to speak a language is only part of what it needs to learn. “Language is how knowledge, tradition, memory and identity get carried from one generation to the next. So when a technology can’t speak your language, it can’t hold your culture either,” she said.
Her vision for Current AI is an open system modeled on the early web, where improvements benefit everyone, no one gets locked out, and communities keep control of their own data.
Current’s first cohort grant round, announced last month, involved deploying $3.2 million to four organizations across Kenya, Lebanon, and the Brazilian Amazon.
The project in Masakhane, Kenya, involves building AI datasets across more than 50 African languages for health, farming, and education; Lebanon’s Institute for Worldmaking is digitizing Arab cultural history and contemporary practice into machine-readable databases that communities (not tech companies) control. Brazil’s Portal sem Porteiras is building offline AI tools with Indigenous Amazon communities, keeping data within the territory. And Kenya’s African Internet Rights Alliance is developing audit tools to hold AI systems accountable across the continent.
Who owns the data?
On the question of data ownership, Bdeir didn’t mince words. “There are different models and proposals for who owns data in various communities, but one thing is sure: it shouldn’t be a company in Silicon Valley trying to make a select few thousand people wealthier,” she told TechCrunch.
The nonprofit’s approach is to store models and data locally, bringing in community experts before anything is built, or writing consent protocols into the pipeline so communities can halt the process at any point.
None of Current AI’s grantees have fully solved it yet. But Bdeir sees that as the point. “Every one of them has built the question into their work,” she said, “rather than accepting the usual default, where complexity becomes the excuse to let a government or a tech company decide for everyone.”
As for how much progress can be made with a $3.2 million budget split across four organizations, Bdeir says, “Scale is not always the measure. That is the Big Tech paradigm,” she said. “This could look like an Indigenous elder in the Brazilian Amazon using a tool built in Kenya to be able to pass down ecological knowledge in their own language.”
Building the stack
Earlier this month in Geneva, Current launched Alpha Chat, an open-source chatbot assembled in seven weeks by a coalition of ten organizations, including Hugging Face, Mozilla, and MIT Media Lab. Each contributor brought a piece of the stack, including a language model, safety tooling, and computing power.
Current AI also struck a deal with Sakana AI, a Tokyo-based startup known for its work on what it calls Sovereign AI. The two organizations plan to build a shared open-source AI stack, one designed to support the Japanese language and culture, but also communities across the Global South that dominant AI systems have largely ignored.
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Tech
‘Odyssey’ director Christopher Nolan calls AI an obvious ‘Trojan horse’
Christopher Nolan, the Oscar-winning director whose new version of “The Odyssey” is currently conquering the box office, said it’s been “pretty encouraging” to see deep skepticism of AI, especially from young people.
Nolan was responding to a question from interviewer Hugo Travers, who publishes on YouTube under the name HugoDécrypte. Travers brought up the legendary Trojan horse, which plays a key role in Nolan’s film — just as the horse was a gift concealing murderous Greek invaders, he wondered if AI might be something “that you welcome in your daily life” only to see it become “something else and something darker.”
Laughing, Nolan responded, “I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside.” He later described the technology as “a transparent horse, it’s made of glass.”
“I’ve never seen a technology advancing so rapidly [that’s been] so completely rejected by the public,” he said. “Everybody’s suspicion of it is so extreme, particularly young people. The reaction to AI videos online and people my children’s age immediately calling it ‘AI slop’ and coining that term and just putting it in a box.”
In Nolan’s view, this is “a very healthy skepticism, because technology is always going to give us great gifts, as you say, but it has to be viewed with skepticism.” Similarly, he said, “The motives of the people giving it to us also have to be viewed with skepticism. That’s when we’ll get the best out of a new technology, rather than just blind faith that everything’s going to be great.” (Meanwhile, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been angrily posting about the film’s nonwhite and transgender cast members.)
Nolan didn’t get more specific about what he views as the threat from AI, but the technology has been a growing source of concern in Hollywood and was a major focus during the writers’ and actors’ strikes of 2023. The Directors Guild of America, where Nolan is president, also won some generative AI protections in its most recent contract.
The director has been famously resistant to other technologies, including smartphones; his embrace of film can make him seem simultaneously like a Luddite and a pioneer, with “The Odyssey” becoming the first feature film to be shot entirely on Imax film and cameras.
When The New York Times recently asked Nolan if he thinks of himself as a technophobe, he replied, “I think of myself as a techno-skeptic,” and said his love of film comes from the fact that it’s “better in terms of representing the way the eye sees the world than any digital imaging system I’ve seen.”
“I embrace new technology all the time, but it tends to be sold to people at the expense of systems that might still be valid and viable,” Nolan said. “That’s what I saw in my industry — throwing the baby out with the bath water. We almost lost film!”
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Tech
Federal employees can download TikTok on their work phones again
The Department of Justice says that federal employees can now download TikTok on their government devices, according to Reuters.
A 2022 law banned federal employees from using the short-form video app on those devices, but the DOJ reportedly says the law no longer applies, thanks to a deal transferring ownership of TikTok’s U.S. operations to a joint venture backed by Oracle, Silver Lake, and MGX. (Oracle serves as the security partner for the new joint venture, while previous owner ByteDance retains a 19.9% stake.)
The DOJ memo reportedly says President Donald Trump has cleared “employees of Executive Branch agencies” to “download TikTok onto their official devices, subject to the agency’s discretion and consistent with all applicable workplace policies.”
Following the ban focused on government employees and devices, the app was banned more broadly across the United States. But just as the law took effect early last year, the app only went down briefly before Trump repeatedly delayed the move and urged service providers to restore access.
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The X-Files May Be Secretly Coming Back To The Big Screen
