Your files stay put: Perplexity’s hybrid AI keeps confidential data off the cloud

The useful part

A frontier model in the cloud breaks a task into subtasks and routes each one to the appropriate place. Web research, long-horizon planning and heavy reasoning run in the cloud, while anything touching private files, local data or actions on the device gets delegated down to a subagent running on the Mac itself. The linchpin is what Perplexity calls a Privacy Gate: a company-trained classifier that runs on the device and scans for personally identifiable informat...

How it works

• Perplexity today launched hybrid compute for its agentic platform, Computer, a system that lets a single AI agent split its work between frontier models running in the cloud and smaller open-weight models...
• The company says it is the first time an AI agent can begin a task in the cloud and dynamically hand off the confidential portions of that same task to a model running on the user's own hardware, without...
• "Hybrid is really compelling because it's often the work that requires confidentiality that is the most important to get right, and so the accuracy really, really matters," Jon Staff, who leads Perplexity's...