Overview
- Perplexity announced Portable Computer Tuesday, August 25 as a local-first edition of its Computer agent that runs models and agent workflows on users' own NVIDIA-equipped Linux machines.
- By default the agent does work on-device with no billing credits charged for local inference and asks the user before sending any individual step to cloud models for tougher reasoning.
- The initial release supports Qwen 3.8 27B and Perplexity’s post-trained PPLX 27B on NVIDIA DGX Spark or Linux PCs with RTX GPUs of at least 24GB VRAM, and it is gated to Pro, Max, Enterprise Pro and Enterprise Max subscribers.
- Perplexity built a deterministic orchestrator plus an OS-level sandbox so the local model proposes actions while inspected code enforces policy, restricts filesystem and network access, and controls execution.
- The company published internal benchmarks showing gains versus some peers, but high hardware and setup costs limit adoption and position Portable Computer as a tool mainly for enthusiasts, prosumers and enterprises; Windows support is expected in September.