Local Perplexity agent launches on Nvidia hardware

A project folder, several documents, an analysis: Perplexity's Portable Computer is designed to handle such multistep tasks directly on Nvidia's DGX Spark AI workstation. The new agent not only provides local file access, but also brings a language model, planning, tool control, task queue and search index to the computer.

That sets Computer apart from a conventional chatbot. The agent can plan tasks, carry out intermediate steps and continue longer jobs. Perplexity names Qwen 3.8 27B and PPLX 27B, a Qwen variant retrained for its own agent stack. Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is expected to be added later.

Local does not mean completely cloud-free. For current web information, browser tasks or particularly demanding reasoning, Portable Computer can call on a remote service — according to Perplexity, only after approval. VentureBeat also reports that before making a cloud request, the system is supposed to check the context for personal or sensitive data and display which content would leave the device. The remote model would reportedly receive only a text request and no access to local files or tools.

The performance figures initially come from Perplexity's own test of 53 tasks involving research, financial analysis and document creation. Qwen 3.8 27B achieved 82.6 percent on a DGX Spark, while PPLX 27B reached 85.4 percent. According to the company, the comparison scores for the open-source agents Pi and Hermes were lower. Perplexity plans to publish the test as open source; until then, independent repetitions using identical hardware and configurations are lacking. On demanding programming tasks, the local Qwen model fell well behind a cloud model in the company's own comparison.

So what does that mean in practice? The approach aims to run frequent, data-sensitive analysis and document tasks locally while selectively allocating cloud computing power to more difficult subtasks. For most personal PCs, getting started is still a long way off: Nvidia lists the DGX Spark at $4,700, and upcoming RTX PCs are expected to require Portable Computer to have at least 24 GB of graphics memory. Support for Linux systems, followed by Windows, has been announced.