Perplexity originally made its name as an AI search engine, but it also has a product called Computer.Computer, which launched earlier this year, is an agentic AI that can complete tasks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 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.Close Why use Perplexity's Portable Computer? Portable Computer will save you a ton of work So, what is the appeal of Portable Computer over just running Qwen 3.8 27B in Ollama? Everything around it.According to Perplexity, Portable Computer "packages step-level routing with the agent harness, local models, inference, tools, app connectors, and sandboxed execution in one maintained system." A good harness combined with the right tools and connectors is the difference between an AI model that is unwieldy and frustrating and one that is actually helpful.
The stack an LLM is a big part of what makes frontier models so compelling.That setup isn't exclusive to Portable Computer—you could even build something similar yourself if you wanted to.The biggest advantage is convenience.
A stack for a fully autonomous local AI, including skills and connectors, is a huge project.With Portable Computer, you can deploy the program on any Linux PC with the right hardware, though the current release targets the DGX Spark specifically.Windows support will arrive later this year.
Related These are the new most powerful mini PCs for local AI Apple's new Mac mini is also its first computer with an M6 chip.Posts By Jon Fingas What do you need to run Portable Computer? Memory is the limit Portable Computer is designed to run using models with 27 billion parameters, and the official requirement is NVIDIA hardware with at least 32GB of VRAM.If you restrict the context or swap in a quantized model, you can get away with less.
In the consumer card lineup, that means the RTX 3090 is basically the "weakest" GPU that you can use.Any RTX GPU with more VRAM will do fine; NVIDIA's DGX Spark, which features a whopping 128GB of RAM shared between the GPU and the CPU, is also up to the job.Whether you'll be able to use multi-GPU setups that add up to 24GB—like two 16GB RTX 5060Tis—is less clear.
Perplexity says you can tweak the local stack to use your own inference server and models, which means it is probably possible, though it may require some tinkering to make it work.You can download and install Portable Computer today.
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