Perplexity Releases Hybrid Compute on Mac: Cloud Agents Orchestrate Down to a Local Model, Gated On Device

- Perplexity shipped Hybrid Compute on Mac: cloud agents do the heavy lifting, but the moment a task touches your privileged files, a local model on your machine takes over — no context lost, no cloud credits burned. An on-device privacy gate decides what crosses the border: keep local, mask, refuse, or ask. They even open-sourced the classifier, PII-Tracer, a 0.6B model that beats 12 detectors at finding every copy of your sensitive data. Translation: your deal docs stay in the threadbare hull instead of some data terrorist's relay window. Enterprise gets org-wide rules and audit logs — the PoD seal of the whole setup. Requirements: Apple silicon, macOS 15+, 24GB RAM. The catch? Recall craters past 10K characters unless you use their sliding-window fix — 0.687 to 0.965. Real engineering, not vaporware. Aggressive passive income for privacy, finally done right. Where's my cut?