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Perplexity AI launches Portable Computer, an on-device AI agent for Nvidia desktops

Perplexity AI introduces Portable Computer, an on-device AI agent for Nvidia-based desktops.

AI News Feed · 2026-08-26 10:28

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

Portable Computer is an on-device version of a cloud-based AI agent called Perplexity Computer, which 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, a desktop computer featuring a graphics card based on the Blackwell architecture, a 20-core CPU and 128 gigabytes of memory. On launch, it uses the open-source Qwen 3.8 27B language model to automate tasks. It also supports PPLX 27B, a version of the model that Perplexity optimized for the DGX Spark. A multi-token prediction mechanism is included to speed up prompt processing.

Qwen 3.8 27B has a context window of 256,000 tokens, but Perplexity determined the model struggles with prompts exceeding 100,000 tokens. Portable Computer addresses this with a context compaction feature that summarizes lengthy prompts to bring them below that threshold.

The AI agent includes pre-packaged skills, or file collections with instructions and other assets, to improve prompt response quality. Perplexity said the initial skill lineup focuses on online research, data science and coding. It also added a mechanism that verifies the accuracy of prompt responses.

If the on-device model cannot complete a task, it can request help from a cloud-based neural network. Portable Computer can connect to several popular software-as-a-service applications, including GitHub. It requires user permission before sending data to external tools and does not give them access to on-device files. The software also features a sandbox that prevents language models from accessing unrelated parts of the operating system and blocks unauthorized network connections.

An upcoming update will expand Portable Computer's availability beyond the DGX Spark to Windows machines with Nvidia RTX graphics cards. Perplexity also plans to add support for the chipmaker's recently released Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model, a mixture-of-experts algorithm with 30 billion parameters optimized for devices with limited processing capacity.