Perplexity's decision model runs fully locally on a Mac — no API key
From the AI digest for 2026-10-22
What happened: Arav Srinivas announced (~8:00 PM US Eastern, 22 October 2026): "You can now run the Perplexity Decision Model fully locally on your Mac, without any data leaving your machine," crediting "the power of open-weight and compact models!" The Perplexity Developers account gives the mechanics: Decider for Mac is an app that runs pplx-decider-flash-v1.2 — the 4-billion-parameter decision model Perplexity released October 16 — on device without an API key: "Ask a question about text or an image and get a probability back, all on your machine," at pplx.ai/decider-for-mac.
What's genuinely new: the decision-model category's local turn becomes a first-party desktop app. Perplexity's open-weights entrant, previously distributed through its API and third-party channels like OpenRouter, now runs entirely on the user's machine — a distribution axis the closed-API entrants (Jev, Cloudflare's Clef) cannot match without releasing weights, and the on-device counterpart to the local-agent surfaces (Portable Computer on RTX and Ryzen AI Max) already on the perplexity-index record. It lands the same day OpenAI opened its Decisions API to all users, sharpening the open-local versus closed-API contrast between the two most prominent decision-model distribution strategies.
Watch: real-world use of a desktop probability-returning app; whether local decision models get wired into agent routing layers; whether the closed-API entrants answer with local modes of their own; the still-open independent-eval gap across Jev, Decisions API, Clef and the deciders.
Links: Arav Srinivas