Perplexity pushed one of its most substantial product updates yet on July 13, 2026, extending its "Computer" agentic assistant with a new memory system, more flexible model routing and a set of build-and-publish tools. According to the company's changelog, the release is aimed at turning Perplexity from a question-answering engine into a persistent work surface.
'Brain': a memory that improves itself
The centerpiece is Brain, described as a self-improving memory that builds a private context graph spanning a user's sessions, connected apps and uploaded files, then refreshes overnight so it gets sharper over time. It is Perplexity's bid to close the gap with rivals on long-running context — the persistent understanding of a user that makes an assistant feel less like a search box and more like a colleague who remembers.
Switching models mid-task
The update also adds mid-task orchestrator model switching — the ability to change the underlying model during a task rather than only at the outset. That lets Perplexity route a single job across different models as its needs change, and the release folds in Claude Opus 4.8 as an option in Fast mode. It is a quiet but meaningful architectural choice: treating models as interchangeable components orchestrated on the fly, not a single fixed brain.
Build and publish
On the output side, users can now publish websites directly — to a hosted pplx.app address or to their own domain via Vercel — turning a research session into a shippable page without leaving the tool. The release also adds financial research on private companies, surfacing fundraising history, implied valuation and secondary-market pricing, a data set usually locked behind expensive terminals.
The positioning
Taken together, the features push Perplexity further from "AI search" and toward a general agentic workspace that remembers, builds and publishes. The company is racing OpenAI, Google and Anthropic to own the daily-driver assistant slot, and persistent memory plus flexible model orchestration are exactly the capabilities that decide which tool users keep open all day. One caveat: the changelog specifics were confirmed via a public mirror after Perplexity's own page returned an access error.