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Greetings, Astral Adventurers — Chris here 👋🏼, with Starfox 🦊 on the wing!
With the worldwide release of Comet being free, most people were still figuring out how to use the Labs feature to build spreadsheets, or just develop good prompts.
Turns out, when you give Perplexity Labs access to the full NES development stack—6502 assembly, tile mapping, sprite management—it doesn't just research retro gaming. It ships retro gaming.
Here's some more looks into what’s fun to do with Perplexity Labs, cool Perplexity Spaces (heh, space, get it?) applications, and MORE no-code workflows for your Saturday special!
Verified sources used for this issue…
Perplexity Search API launch, snippet-level retrieval, SDK and eval framework (search_evals).[12]
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✨ Executive Summary
🚀 The Breakthrough (WHAT):
Background Assistants enable true parallel task automation—multiple AI agents working simultaneously on different tasks while you focus elsewhere.
🚀 The Opportunity (WHY):
This shifts us from "AI helps me work" to "AI works for me"—the first mainstream implementation of agentic commerce at scale.
🚀 The Implementation (HOW):
Download Comet and try a Max subscription; Max subscribers get access today via Comet browser. Set up multiple tasks, monitor via dashboard, intervene when needed.
🎯 Perplexity Playbook: Your Daily Masterclass
Building Your First Background Assistant Workflow
The Problem:
Traditional AI requires constant supervision. You ask, wait for response, give feedback, iterate. Every task demands your active attention.
The Background Solution:
Background Assistants work independently on multiple tasks while you handle other priorities. Set up three tasks, monitor progress via dashboard, intervene only when needed.
Step-by-Step Setup:
Access Requirements: Perplexity Max subscription ($200/month)
Launch Comet Browser: Download Perplexity’s Comet
Activate Background Mode: Click the dashboard icon in Comet
Queue Multiple Tasks:
"Book cheapest tickets to [concert] and add to cart"
"Draft follow-up email to [client] about project timeline"
"Find best direct flight options for [destination] on [date]"
Monitor Dashboard: Track progress across all tasks
Intervene When Prompted: Approve purchases, review drafts, finalize bookings
Why This Beats Sequential AI:
Parallel execution means 3 tasks complete in the time it used to take for 1. Your productivity multiplies by the number of simultaneous tasks.
Try This Today: Start with 2-3 simple, independent tasks. Watch how the dashboard updates. Notice where human approval is required vs. fully autonomous execution.
How useful is the above to your enterprise?
🎯 3 No-Code Workflows (Under An Hour)
Goal: Cranking up the value of our new Perplexity Max subscription…
Viral Content Research Engine
Name: TrendSpotter Pro
Stack: Perplexity Search + Labs + Spaces
Setup: ~15 minutes
Magic Prompt: "Search recent viral content in [your niche] across Reddit, Twitter, TikTok, and YouTube. Create a comprehensive report with trending topics, engagement patterns, and content formats that are gaining traction. Include specific examples and why they're working."
Cost: Pro plan ($20) vs. hiring content researcher ($500+)
vs ChatGPT: Real-time web data and citations vs. outdated training data
Automated Space for Client Research
Name: ClientIntel Hub
Stack: Perplexity Spaces + file uploads + custom instructions
Setup: ~30 minutes per client
Magic Prompt: Upload client files, then ask: "Analyze this client's industry, competitors, and market position. Create a strategic overview with opportunities, threats, and recommended next steps based on current market data."
Cost: Pro plan vs. market research firm ($2000+)
vs ChatGPT: Document analysis + live web research vs. static file processing
I use a version of this for The Comet’s Tale content!
Background Commerce Assistant
Name: ShopBot Supreme
Stack: Background Assistants + Comet browser
Setup: ~45 minutes initial configuration
Magic Prompt: "Monitor [product category] for price drops, compare features across top 5 options, and alert me when deals match my criteria: [specific requirements]. Queue purchase when optimal price point is reached."
Cost: Max plan ($200) vs. hiring virtual assistant ($800+/month)
vs ChatGPT: Active web browsing + purchase execution vs. text-only recommendations
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🤦🏼♂️ Cosmic Curios & Meteoric Mishaps - Viral Fails Worth Learning From
When Perplexity Gets Weird…
This week's viral mishap: Someone asked Perplexity Labs to "create a professional LinkedIn post about my pet goldfish's career achievements." The result? A detailed corporate biography for "Bubbles McKenzie, Senior Aquatic Operations Specialist" complete with 5 years at "AquaCorp Industries" and expertise in "underwater stakeholder engagement."
The lesson? AI creativity has no bounds—sometimes that's a feature, not a bug.
Other cosmic curios:
Comet user discovers browsing patterns: Background Assistant noticed they research flights every Tuesday but never book. Started automatically flagging "decision-ready" options. Accidental productivity coaching.
Perplexity Spaces goes viral in academia: Students creating collaborative study hubs with shared documents and custom AI instructions. One group's "Organic Chemistry Helper" space gained 200+ members across universities.
Email Assistant writes breakup letter: Max subscriber accidentally CC'd their Email Assistant on a personal relationship thread. AI drafted a "professional transition communication" for ending a romantic relationship. User reports it was "disturbingly effective."
🦊 What does the Fox say? Trust but verify, team! Even the smartest AI needs a wingman. Stay sharp, and remember—automation amplifies both good decisions and bad ones.
🔬 This Week's Tests (Falsifiable)
Run these experiments and log results in your Claims Log:
Background Assistant Productivity: Set up 3 parallel tasks, time total completion vs. sequential execution. Hypothesis: 3X speed improvement with equal quality.
Spaces Collaboration: Create shared Space with team, measure research velocity vs. traditional document sharing. Hypothesis: 40% reduction in information gathering time.
Labs Video Integration: Use Labs to create video content for social media campaign, track engagement vs. traditional video production. Hypothesis: Comparable engagement at 10X lower cost.
Log incidents and screenshots in your Claims Log. Share anonymized results by Friday for next week's aggregate analysis.
👨🏼🔬 Research Spotlight: The Search API Revolution
Perplexity's Search API launched this month with a game-changing proposition: access to the same global-scale infrastructure that powers their public answer engine, covering hundreds of billions of webpages.
What Makes This Different:
Unlike legacy search APIs that return document-level results, Perplexity's API provides fine-grained, sub-document units with pre-ranked snippets. This means AI applications get precisely the contextual information they need without preprocessing overhead.
Developer Impact:
The API sits at the "Pareto frontier of relevance and speed" according to Perplexity's benchmarks. Early developers report building impressive prototypes in under an hour using the new Search SDK alongside AI coding tools.
Business Applications:
Real-time competitive intelligence
Automated market research pipelines
Dynamic content personalization
Agentic workflow automation
Try This: If you're building AI applications, the Search API offers superior performance at lower cost than traditional search providers. The open-source evaluation framework search_evals lets you benchmark performance yourself.
This is infrastructure that transforms how AI systems access and process web information.
🤔 Perplexify Me!! Q&A
"Can Background Assistants really handle complex multi-step tasks without constant supervision?" -Sarah J.
Context: This gets to the heart of agentic AI vs. traditional chatbots.
🦊 Star Fox: Yes, Sarah, for well-defined tasks with clear success criteria. Background Assistants excel at independent execution within specified parameters. The key is task design. Simple, independent tasks (book tickets, draft emails, research flights) work beautifully in parallel. Complex, interdependent workflows still need human orchestration. Start with 3 tasks that don't depend on each other. "Find best restaurant reservations for Friday," "Draft thank-you email to client," and "Research competitor pricing." Each can complete independently while you handle other priorities. The magic happens when you realize you've accomplished 3 hours of work in 20 minutes of AI execution time.
🏁 Final Words — Tailored to Today
Today's principle: Parallel execution beats sequential optimization. Background Assistants don't just make individual tasks faster—they let you complete multiple workflows simultaneously. This isn't about better AI; it's about completely different AI.
The transition from "AI helps me" to "AI works for me" represents a fundamental shift in human-machine collaboration. When AI operates independently in the background, your role evolves from operator to orchestrator.
Community Shoutout: To the developer who built a Background Assistant monitoring system using Perplexity's Search API—tracking when your assistants need human intervention across multiple workflows. Pure architectural thinking.
Tomorrow's teaser: Perplexity's research team is dropping new techniques for training math reasoning models with reinforcement learning. We'll dive into how GRPO algorithms and smart data mixing are pushing model capabilities beyond traditional supervised fine-tuning.
Remember—today is the worst this technology will ever be. Background Assistants working in parallel while you sleep? That's not science fiction. That's Saturday morning.
Keep shipping. Stay curious. Think parallel.
Comet on! ☄️💫
— Chris Dukes
Managing Editor, The Comet's Tale ☄️
Founder/CEO, Parallax Analytics
Beta Tester, Perplexity Comet
parallax-ai.app | [email protected]
— Starfox 🦊
Personal AI Agent — Technical Architecture, Research Analysis, Workflow Optimization
Scan. Target. Architect. Research. Focus. Optimize. X‑ecute.
P.S. — Want to experiment with Background Assistants but not ready for Max pricing? Hit reply, or fill out this form and let’s talk.