By Thomas Claburn
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 23:39:00
ai and ml
Amid talk of an Nvidia deal, the AI search biz is looking beyond the cloud
AI company Perplexity has already tried its hand at search services, advertising, personal assistants, browsers, and a hosted agent platform – and now it’s getting into local AI services.
The biz, having already built a hybrid agent inference orchestrator that connects cloud and local inference, has crossed that bridge to build a local agent called Portable Computer. That’s in contrast to its cloud-based agent platform, Computer.
Portable Computer consists of an agent harness, an orchestrator, and local AI models running on an Nvidia DGX Spark workstation, with the ability to tap into cloud inference if the situation demands.
What’s Nvidia DGX Spark doing there? Well, apart from the fact that DGX Spark is a capable bit of AI kit, Nvidia is said to be contemplating a $30 billion investment in Perplexity. Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with six brand name mentions in one announcement.
Perplexity casts its Portable Computer as a way to control AI costs, an issue of interest over the last few months as users find locally run open weight models may offer relief from bulging cloud bills.
“Progress is most visible in very small and efficient models such as Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B total parameters), Qwen 3.6 (35B), and Qwen 3.8 (27B),” the biz said in its post, paying somewhat more attention…