“Silicon Valley AI unicorn switches to Alibaba Qianwen: Perplexity is built based on Qwen3.8 to create local agents”

Silicon Valley AI unicorn Perplexity has announced the launch of a local agent product called Portable Computer. The core large model used in this product is Alibaba’s open-sourced Qwen3.8-27B. Perplexity was previously valued at over $30 billion, and its agent strategy is transitioning from cloud-based to local solutions, with the choice of large models shifting from Claude and GPT series to Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen. The company has optimized the PPLX 27B series of algorithms on NVIDIA DGX Spark hardware, aiming to improve efficiency in tasks such as file processing, data analysis, and programming. Recently, Alibaba has also opened-source models such as Qwen3.8-Max, Qwen3.8-27B, and Qwen3.8-Flash, which have gained recognition in the Hugging Face community.