A Local-First Agent for Private and Cost-Effective Knowledge Work
Perplexity details Portable Computer, a local-first agent whose model, harness, conversation and trajectory live on-device by default, with web search, connectors and cloud advisor escalation only on user-approved demand. A lean local harness (on-demand skills, CLI connectors, self-verification, sandboxed execution) is co-designed around Qwen 3.8 27B, then post-trained into PPLX 27B. On the 53-task Local Knowledge Work Bench, Computer scores 82.6% vs Hermes 74.0% and Pi 77.6%, rising to 85.4% with PPLX 27B; it also leads BrowseComp (66.7%) and ParseBench-100 (65.1%) with the least time and tokens, while advisor escalation recovers ~3/5 of the Terminal Bench 2.1 frontier gap at ~2/3 of frontier cost.
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local-firstPerplexityharnessDGX SparkLocal Preference
