Perplexity, a largely forgotten player in the AI space save for its role as Joe Rogan’s personal fact checker, is looking to regain some relevance by asking people to think global, process local. The company announced Tuesday that it is launching Portable Computer, a version of its agentic “Computer” platform that runs entirely locally on your own hardware.
Computer was launched by Perplexity back in February to offer users an always-on AI agent that can run autonomously to complete tasks whether you’re at the keyboard or not. Computer took the OpenClaw approach, where the agentic platform runs on a dedicated device like a Mac Mini, but the actual AI processing is still cloud-based. Portable Computer walls off the garden completely, bringing the model on device—meaning it’s running entirely on a user’s hardware.
That requires more processing power, which is why Perplexity’s initial release of Portable Computer is limited to Nvidia’s DGX Spark desktop supercomputer and Linux machines with Nvidia RTX GPUs. Part of the appeal of the Mac Mini for AI agents like OpenClaw was the bang for your buck on processing power—a Mac Mini with an M4 chip sets you back about $900. You’re going to need to fork over about 5x that price for a DGX Spark.
The benefit is that’s a one-time fee. You won’t have to keep tabs on your tokenmaxxing because there’s a credits bill coming at the end of the month, since everything is done locally (except when it isn’t, but Portable Computer will ask before pinging the cloud for additional processing power, per Perplexity).
The other trade-off, though, is that the model selection will be limited. One of the pitches Perplexity made when it launched Computer was that users would be able to tap into 19 different AI models to tackle whatever prompt you give it. With Portable Computer, it’ll launch with Qwen 3.8 27B developed by Alibaba or PPLX 27B, which is the same Qwen model that has been post-trained by Perplexity. Nvidia’s Nemotron 3.5 Lightning is expected to be available soon.
Despite running locally, Perplexity did make a point to highlight that Portable Computer can still connect to popular apps. Per VentureBeat, the company showed off a demo that included Portable Computer sharing some data analysis directly to a Slack channel on behalf of the user and said that it could also connect to Google Drive, Gmail, and GitHub.
The heavy Nvidia connection to Portable Computer is likely not a coincidence. The chip giant is reportedly mulling making an investment in Perplexity that would value the company at $30 billion, so it makes sense that it’d like to see what it’s investing in firsthand before taking the plunge.
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