By Nick Lewis
Publication Date: 2026-08-25 18:50:00
Perplexity originally made its name as an AI search engine, but it also has a product called Computer.
Computer, which launched earlier this year, is an agentic AI that can complete tasks on your behalf. It is a general-purpose work companion that uses the same interfaces and applications that you do. You describe a job using normal language, then Computer will run subagents as needed to perform research and connect tools.
Now, Perplexity is launching Portable Computer. The intent of Portable Computer is similar to Computer, with one fundamental difference: it is local first. At launch, Portable Computer will be able to use Qwen 3.8 27B or Qwen PPLX 27B, a Qwen model that has received additional training. Support for NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B) will be available soon.
Portable Computer is designed to run as many things as it can locally, on your own hardware. You can summarize documents, extract information and perform analyses, send files to apps, or any other number of jobs. However, if Portable Computer runs into a task that is too complex for the local model, it will stop and ask you if you’d like to offload to a larger, cloud-based model instead.
The local-first design allows you to use AI to handle data that you may not want on the cloud. It also has a practical perk: anything you do locally doesn’t consume credits or tokens, and the cost of running a local AI is small once you already own the hardware.
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