AI NewsPerplexity

Most search systems scan a document as text, losing tables and layout. Perplexity’s new models instead treat a page as an image, so they “see” a PDF, slide, or scan the way a person would, and a small model can search an index built by a much bigger one.
Perplexity released two open-weight models on October 7: a 0.6B version built for phones or edge devices, and a 9B version built for building a high-quality search index. Both convert text, images, and page images into the same shared numerical format, so a developer can build a large, accurate index with the 9B model, then run fast day-to-day searches with the small one. On MADQA, a test of answering questions from PDF documents, the 9B model scored 92.4%, the best result among retrieval-only systems tested, though it still trailed a more complex agentic search system.
Both are free for commercial use under the MIT license, available now on Hugging Face, with a hosted API still to come.
Key Capabilities:

• Mix and match: A 9B-built index can be searched using the smaller, cheaper 0.6B model.
• No OCR needed: Reads PDFs and slides as images directly, keeping tables and layout intact.
• Top score: 92.4% on MADQA, the best among pure retrieval systems Perplexity tested

AMD partnered with Perplexity to bring Portable Computer to Windows PCs with Ryzen AI Max processors, letting users run AI agents locally without sending data to the cloud.
AMD partnered with Perplexity to bring Portable Computer to Windows PCs built around Ryzen AI Max Series processors, announced September 24. It's a new hardware path for existing software: the same agent harness, orchestrator, and 27B model now run on AMD chips.
Ryzen AI Max pairs CPU and graphics processing with shared memory, letting a local model run alongside other apps. Inference completed on the PC skips Computer credits, and cloud escalation to 15+ frontier models remains available but requires explicit permission.
Key Capabilities:

• New hardware option: Runs on AMD Ryzen AI Max Series processors, not just NVIDIA RTX GPUs.
• No credits used: Inference completed on-device skips Perplexity's Computer credits entirely.
• Permission-gated cloud: Escalating to 15+ frontier models requires explicit user approval.