Perplexity shipped Hybrid Compute for its Computer agent on Mac on September 1. Tasks run on frontier cloud models by default — Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol. An on-device classifier watches every step, and the moment it spots passwords, financial data, or health records, it asks if you want that step handled by a local model instead.
How the routing works
The local model is PPLX Qwen 3.8 27B, downloaded in one click — no Ollama, no config files. Before anything leaves your machine, the classifier swaps names, addresses, and account numbers for stand-ins, then restores them when results return. Perplexity open-sourced the classifier itself. Requirements: Apple Silicon, macOS 15, 24GB unified memory minimum (32GB recommended). Local steps burn zero cloud credits. Pro, Max, and Enterprise only.
Why this matters
Every agent product so far forced a choice: smart cloud models that see everything, or private local models that are dumber. Hybrid Compute is the first consumer agent to auto-route between the two, per step. That’s the real blocker for agents touching your bank account — and Perplexity solved it on Apple’s own hardware before Apple did.
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