Perplexity AI launches Portable Computer on-device AI agent

AI

Perplexity AI Inc. today introduced Portable Computer, an artificial intelligence agent designed to run on desktops equipped with Nvidia Corp. silicon.

The launch follows a report that Nvidia is weighing an investment in the startup that could value it at over $30 billion. Furthermore, Nvidia has reportedly floated the idea of licensing Perplexity’s technology and hiring key employees.

Portable Computer is an on-device version of a cloud-based AI agent called Perplexity Computer that debuted in February. Both tools are designed to perform multi-step tasks such as developing web applications. When Perplexity Computer encounters a particularly time-consuming task, it splits the work into smaller chunks and assigns each one to a different subagent.

Portable Computer brings similar capabilities to Nvidia’s DGX Spark device (pictured). It’s a desktop computer that features a graphics card based on the company’s Blackwell architecture. Additionally, the system ships with a 20-core central processing unit and 128 gigabytes of memory.

On launch, Portable Memory uses the open-source Qwen 3.8 27B language model to automate tasks. It also supports a version of the algorithm called PPLX 27B that Perplexity optimized for the DGX Spark. The company added in a so-called multi-token prediction mechanism designed to speed up prompt processing. 

Qwen 3.8 27B has a context window of 256,000 tokens. In practice, however, Perplexity determined that the model struggles to process prompts with more than 100,000 tokens. The company addressed that limitation by equipping Portable Computer with a so-called context compaction feature. It summarizes lengthy prompts to bring them below the 100,00 token mark.

Personal Computer includes several pre-packaged skills, file collections that include instructions and other assets designed to boost the quality of prompt responses. Perplexity says the initial skill lineup focuses on use cases such as online research, data science and coding. Additionally, the company has added a mechanism that verifies the accuracy of prompt responses. 

If Portable Computer’s on-device model struggles to complete a task, it can request help from a cloud-based neural network. It can also connect to several popular software-as-a-service applications including GitHub. Portable Computer requests user permission before sending data to external tools and doesn’t provide them with access to on-device files.

According to Perplexity, the software also includes other guardrails. It features a sandbox that prevents language models from accessing parts of the user’s operating system that aren’t relevant to their work. Additionally, Portable Computer blocks unauthorized network connections.

An upcoming update will expand the tool’s availability beyond the DGX Spark to Windows machines that feature Nvidia RTX graphics cards. Additionally, Perplexity plans to add support for the chipmaker’s recently released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model. It’s a mixture of experts algorithm with 30 billion parameters that is optimized to run on devices with limited processing capacity.

Photo: Nvidia