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
Tesla brings its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston
Tesla is expanding its robotaxi service to Dallas and Houston, according to a social media post from the company.
The post says simply that “Robotaxi is now rolling out in Dallas & Houston 🤠” and includes a 14-second video showing Tesla vehicles driving without human monitors or drivers in the front seat.
The company now offers robotaxi service in three cities, all of them in Texas, after launching in Austin last year and starting to offer rides without safety drivers in January 2026. In a February filing, Tesla said that its Austin robotaxis have been involved in 14 crashes since launch.
It also offers a more limited ride service with human drivers in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Tesla may not be running many vehicles in either of these new markets yet, with crowdsourced data on the Robotaxi Tracker website only registering a single vehicle in each city (compared to 46 active vehicles logged in Austin).
Tech
Netflix plans to add a vertical video feed, use AI for recommendations
Netflix is going to launch a TikTok-like vertical video feed within its apps this month, and plans to use AI broadly for content creation and recommendations, the company said on Thursday.
Netflix has been testing a vertical video feed since last year. The short video feature could aid users with discovering video podcasts, along with the current slate of shows and movies. The company is also leaning more into using AI for recommendations after launching a ChatGPT-powered search feature last year.
“We have been in personalization and recommendation for two decades, but we still see tremendous room to make it better by leveraging newer technologies,” Netflix co-CEO Gregory Peters said during the company’s first-quarter conference call. “Recommendation systems based on new model architectures not only improve current personalization but also let us iterate and improve more quickly — adding support for different content types much more efficiently.”
Co-CEO Ted Sarandos said he sees AI tools improving the entire content creation process. “In general, we expect GenAI to make content better; better tools, better processes […] It takes a great artist to make great art, and AI won’t change that. But AI will give those artists better tools to bring those visions to life,” he said.
Last month, Netflix bought Ben Affleck’s AI creation company InterPositive, which, Sarandos said, has garnered interest from creators.
“With our acquisition of InterPositive, we think it accelerates our GenAI capability because it is proprietary technology created specifically for filmmakers and filmmaking, different from other GenAI video applications. While our ownership of InterPositive is very new, we have generated interest with creators who have spent time with the tools, and we are seeing momentum build around adoption,” he noted.
Netflix also mentioned that it wants to use AI to improve its ad suite, and allow for new formats and customization to get better returns. The company expects to generate ad revenue of $3 billion this year.
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Netflix reported revenue of $12.25 billion in Q1 2026, up 16.2% year-year-year, and said profit jumped 83% to $5.28 billion. Alongside the first-quarter results, Netflix said its co-founder and chair, Reed Hastings, is leaving the company’s board this summer.
Notably, the company hiked subscription prices in the U.S. late last month, which could have a positive impact next quarter. The company said it ended 2025 with 325 million paying subscribers.
Tech
Bluesky confirms DDoS attack is cause of continued app outages
Bluesky’s website and app are still struggling on Friday after experiencing service interruptions that chief operating officer Rose Wang attributed to an ongoing cyberattack.
On Thursday evening, the social media company confirmed that a “sophisticated Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack” was to blame for the issues, which had originally started on April 15 at around 8:40 p.m. ET.
Distributed denial-of-service attacks often involve pummeling apps or websites with large amounts of junk web traffic aimed at overloading and knocking its servers offline. While these kinds of cyberattacks do not involve intrusions into a company’s systems, these incidents can still be disruptive to both the company and its users.
In a post on the Bluesky account, the company shared the cause of the problem and noted that the attack was “impacting our operations, with users experiencing intermittent interruptions in service for their feeds, notifications, threads, and search.”
Bluesky said that it has not seen any evidence of unauthorized access to private data, however.
When originally reached for comment on Thursday, Bluesky only pointed us to the status.bsky.app page and account (@status.bsky.app) for updates. The company did not provide an estimated time for a fix.
The network’s status page is currently not working, however.
Bluesky said it will provide another update on the status of the attack and its mitigation by 1 p.m. ET on Friday.
Because the outages are intermittent, the Bluesky site and app will load at times, slowly, and other times will display error messages.
For instance, switching to a particular feed within the app could display a message that says, “This feed is currently receiving high traffic and is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later. Message from server: Rate Limit Exceeded.”
Popular feeds like Discover or the official Bluesky Team’s feed often see this problem, even as users’ own personal feeds are functional.
Other times, like when trying to visit a user’s profile, the site will display an error message, forcing you to refresh and try again.
Bluesky protocol engineer Bryan Newbold remarked around 3:46 a.m. ET on Wednesday, “oof, our services are getting hit pretty hard tonight.”
Notably, the service disruptions are impacting Bluesky, but other communities, like Blacksky, that run their own infrastructure on the underlying protocol that powers the decentralized social network, are still functioning.
Blacksky’s team told TechCrunch that the Bluesky outage has led to a “significant spike” in migration requests from Bluesky users over the past 12 hours, as users, devs, and other ATmosphere founders like Sebastian at Eurosky have been promoting its services.
It was clear that Bluesky’s team was in a hectic state this week while facing these issues, as one message on its status page had a typo: ” investigating an incident with service in one of our reginos [sic].”
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