Perplexity ships the next generation of its open decision models — pplx-decider v1.2, now with vision, and by evening on OpenRouter and Vercel
From the AI digest for 2026-10-16
What happened: Perplexity Developers (~10:42 AM ET): "Our next generation of open weights multimodal decision models comes in two sizes, pplx-decider-v1.2 and pplx-decider-flash-v1.2. Text and vision scores improve. Inference is up to 5x faster: all questions in a request run in one pass. Flash is the top 4B on the Decision Index." Arav Srinivas amplified the launch (~2:42 PM ET) and then pointed builders at the official quickstart docs (~4:32 PM ET): https://docs.perplexity.ai/docs/decisions/quickstart — the second open-weights generation of the decision-model family, multimodal from launch, with numbers and a documentation path attached.
What's genuinely new: The record's decision-models thread has three families now (TypeSafe's Jev, these, plus what the Artificial Analysis Decision Index scored Tuesday); the genuinely new pieces are vision in a decision model — the routing/judgment role gaining eyes — the speed of the generation (v1.2 under a week after the index's first outing), and the shape of the evidence: the top-4B claim is scored on the Decision Index itself, the vendor citing the field's independent runner rather than a house benchmark. The record's runner remains its independent check. Distribution then widens through the evening: Arav Srinivas (~5:35 PM ET October 16) — "Openrouter is the best place to use Perplexity Decider models," with OpenRouter's listing carrying the family's first on-record sizes: Decider v1.2 a new 27B checkpoint succeeding v1.1; Flash v1.2 at 4B, faster and half the cost framing; then (~9:21 PM ET October 16): the same two models listed on Vercel's AI Gateway — perplexity/pplx-decider-v1.2 "for complex agent workflows" and pplx-decider-flash-v1.2 "for ultra-fast decisions" — per Vercel's changelog. The open-weights distribution thesis now has two named third-party channel placements the same day as launch.
Watch: the published model cards (whether the 27B/4B sizes and benchmark rows match the OpenRouter and Vercel listings, and whether the "Flash top 4B" row is the same Decision Index the runner scored Tuesday), whether v1.2 answers the index's "less accurate on knowledge" finding, uptake in the record's own runner — and whether gateway/reseller distribution outruns independent evaluation the way it did for Argon.
Links: Perplexity Developers — the v1.2 family · Arav Srinivas — quickstart docs · Perplexity Developers · Arav Srinivas — OpenRouter listing, 27B/4B sizes · Arav Srinivas — Vercel AI Gateway · Vercel changelog