Perplexity Brings Hybrid Cloud-and-Local AI Compute to Mac

Generative AI assistants typically rely on cloud-based frontier models for reasoning and search, creating privacy and compliance concerns when users work with confidential documents or personal files. Perplexity’s hybrid architecture seeks to preserve the capabilities of cloud agents while using on-device processing on Mac to keep sensitive information under the user’s control.

Perplexity’s latest Mac release introduces Hybrid Compute, with cloud frontier models handling planning, search and agent orchestration while an on-device privacy gateway routes sensitive data to a local AI model. The design allows private material to inform an assistant’s workflow without being transmitted to the cloud, addressing a key obstacle to using AI agents with confidential information.