Tweet: http://x.com/i/article/2044791192660160512 Article: "The Computer is Personal " Anyone who makes anything, or does anything important, is curious. If you’re not curious, you’re an NPC. There’s no exception. Curiosity is the number one condition for success, it doesn’t matter what your goals are. When I talk to startup founders it’s the same as when I talk to scientists or big CEO’s. They all ask, “why do we do it this way?” Artists, writers, athletes, and engineers all question the status quo. You do it, too. Everyone has at least one idea that doesn’t seem to leave them alone. Maybe it's a product you think should exist, or a company. Maybe it's an untapped ambition. We call it curiosity, but whatever you want to call it, you were born with it. And for 400 years, the computer has been the most important tool of curious people. Computing became a tax on personal agency 400 years predates electricity. When sailors needed to know where they were on Earth, “computers” were people who put the moon and stars into tables. Astronomers used them to build the nautical almanac and move ships across oceans. When the computer was a mainframe, NASA scientists turned radar and orbital math into real-time decisions. They moved humanity beyond the planet. The promise of computing has always been what it can enable us to do. But the problem with modern computing is the tax on your own agency. There are so many tools meant to help you execute that it’s a second job just to manage them. Some software requires whole teams to manage. It’s no one’s fault. The computer has just been unable to keep up with what we ask of it. I've watched this affect some of the most capable people I know. Founders who are brilliant at product but spend half their week in operations. Engineers who could be designing systems but are stuck with routing tasks. Small business owners who started something because they had a gift, and now they spend their days managing people and vendors. Our tools have become so advanced and so numerous that time spent just orchestrating them caps our own individual agency to achieve anything with them. This is what AI will solve. This is the future of the computer. Computer is now the orchestrator Previously I’ve written that AI is the computer. I don’t mean it as a joke. The changes we are all witnessing in AI are fundamentally evolving what it means to be a computer. This is because the advent of AI comes at a maturing moment for the web. The web has evolved into both the storage layer and the working memory of modern knowledge work. It is the world’s SSD in the sense that blogs, documents, datasets, videos, code, archives, and institutional knowledge all now live online. The web also became the world’s RAM: it is the active workspace where people communicate, collaborate, search, write, analyze, transact, coordinate, and make decisions in real time. This is why deep research capabilities are so important to AI. Deep research and search grounded in accuracy aren’t products or features so much as they are foundations. Because any AI agent doing real work for you needs to be able to constantly research and learn in order to complete the task and advance the workflow. The operating system has also evolved. The OS as we once knew it is instruction-based. Now, the OS takes objectives. When AI is the computer, it takes probabilistic goals and converts them into executable paths. It evaluates, reasons, and repeats. All of this is in service of removing the management friction that hinders your ability to make real progress. It is in service of the original goal of all computers: to serve your curiosity. This is what we did with Perplexity Computer. But it’s incomplete. The missing element in this notion of computing is simple: your curiosity is YOUR curiosity. Whatever anyone is trying to achieve, whether it's to change history or change majors, is unique to them. Curiosity is inherently personal. The computer is personal. At Apple’s annual shareholder meeting on January 24, 1984, Steve Jobs delivered the keynote. He played the “1984” commercial, and dramatically unveiled the Macintosh on stage, pulling it from a bag and demoing it himself. It was not the world’s first personal computer. But with a mouse, and a graphical interface, it was the first computer built for anyone. That is the philosophy behind our launch of Personal Computer. Human agency is about to expand like never before. When the computer handles more of the execution, the orchestration, and the operational noise, people get to spend more time doing what has always been the #1 driver of progress and success: wondering and working to make it even better. More invention. More craftsmanship. More science, judgement, taste, and curiosity of every form. As AI becomes the computer, and the computer becomes more personal, you can be the founder without first becoming the bureaucrat. You can own and grow a small business without acting as the manual router between every customer request, vendor dependency, internal process, and system update. Perplexity Computer is a platform for everyone who is truly curious. It vastly expands your agency and your capabilities to achieve. Steve Jobs is a legend of curiosity. He questioned the status quo and built a new reality that we all now inhabit. That’s just what curious people do. Steve also famously called the computer “a bicycle for the mind.” And later in the same interview he said, “that's nothing compared to what's coming in the next 100 years” It took only 36 years. Today, the Personal Computer is a Ferrari for your mind. The most curious among us will see what they can do with it. https://www.perplexity.ai/personal-computer