Perplexity Launches Hybrid Compute on Mac With Local Privacy Gate

Perplexity on September 1, 2026 introduced hybrid compute for the Perplexity Mac app, a mode that divides each Perplexity Computer task between frontier models in the cloud and a local model running on the Mac itself. According to the company's announcement, hybrid compute is available now to Perplexity Pro, Max, and Enterprise subscribers. It launches with three local models: Gemma 4 E4B, Qwen3.6 35B-A3B, and a Perplexity model post-trained for Perplexity Computer. The feature runs on any…