By Alexei Oreskovic
Publication Date: 2026-03-12 10:39:00
Good morning. Of all the tech press events and product launches I’ve attended over the years, Perplexity’s conference on Wednesday was a first: a church. To be fair, this particular baroque style church in San Francisco’s North Beach neighborhood, is now a full-time event space. Still, the symbolism of a tech company preaching the AI gospel to a congregation of developers was almost too on the nose.
Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas invoked the legacy of pioneering astronomers—the “curious” people, like Edmond Halley, who asked questions and changed the world. Back then, Srinivas noted, a computer was the name for an astronomer’s apprentice; the underling tasked with doing the calculations to support the boss’ celestial theories. And just as a computer eventually morphed into a physical object with a circuit board and chips, another evolution is now underway. A computer is not a tangible piece of hardware anymore, Srinivas said, it’s the functionality that the AI provides—the LLMs and agents toiling away for you.
Of course, the speech also had a more mundane, commercial message: Perplexity is launching a new set of agentic AI products—including the Perplexity “Personal Computer”—designed to challenge the OpenClaw build-your-own agents craze. Perplexity says its approach is safer and more reliable. Ultimately, the market will decide which agentic platforms work best. But Perplexity showed it can tell a good story—and in tech, even in the age…
