Overview
- Perplexity announced Portable Computer on Tuesday as a local‑first version of its Computer agent that runs models and multi‑step tasks on a user’s machine by default.
- The software is available now to paid Pro, Max and enterprise subscribers on Linux with Windows support due in September and it asks for user permission before sending any step to cloud models.
- At launch Portable Computer supports Qwen 3.8‑27B and Perplexity’s post‑trained PPLX 27B, allows users to bring their own models, and plans to add NVIDIA’s Nemotron 3.5 Lightning later.
- The package bundles a local inference engine, a deterministic agent harness, an OS‑level sandbox and connectors for Google Drive, Gmail, Slack and GitHub so agents can work with local files and tools safely.
- High hardware needs limit early use to developers and organizations because Portable Computer requires an NVIDIA DGX Spark or RTX GPUs with at least 24GB of VRAM, and reports of a possible NVIDIA investment in Perplexity remain unconfirmed.