By Michael Nuñez
Publication Date: 2026-02-26 10:00:00
Perplexity, the AI-powered search company valued at $20 billion, on Wednesday launched what it calls the most ambitious product in its three-year history: a multi-model agent orchestration platform called Computer that coordinates 19 different AI models to complete complex, long-running workflows entirely in the background.
The product, currently available only to Perplexity Max subscribers at $200 per month, is the company’s clearest articulation yet of a thesis it has been refining for more than a year: that AI models are not converging into general-purpose commodities but are instead specializing — and that the company best positioned to win the next era of AI is the one that can orchestrate all of them together.
“What has Perplexity been up to last two months? We’ve silently been working on the next big thing,” CEO Aravind Srinivas wrote on X, announcing that “Computer unifies every current capability of AI into a single system.” Srinivas said the system treats models as interchangeable tools rather than core products. “It’s multi-model by design,” he wrote. “When models specialise, they just become tools similar to the file system, CLI tools, connectors, browser, search.”
Computer arrives at a moment when the AI industry is grappling with a fundamental question: now that foundation models have become extraordinarily capable, who captures the value? The model makers — OpenAI, Anthropic, Google — or the companies that sit above them and turn raw intelligence into…
