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Apple's CarPlay now lets drivers use voice-based AI assistants including ChatGPT, Perplexity, Meta AI, Grok, and Anthropic's Claude, with Siri AI added for iOS 27 users on iPhone 15 Pro or newer. Drivers can launch a new voice chat or resume prior conversations directly from the CarPlay Home Screen, and can rearrange app icons via iPhone Settings for easier access.
Security researcher Gal Weizman of Forever Security found that a single malicious browser extension could take over AI assistants embedded in Chrome, Edge, Opera Neon, Perplexity Comet and Claude in Chrome, using Chromium's declarativeNetRequest feature to manipulate trusted network traffic without any user interaction. The technique, called BragJack, earned Weizman over $20,000 in bug bounties across the five vendors and generated two CVEs, with Google and Microsoft having already patched the issues.
A marketing strategist warns that ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini frequently describe companies inaccurately, citing discontinued products, misattributed positioning, and wrong pricing or locations. He recommends founders run a 'mirror test' by asking multiple AI tools the same questions about their business to see how they're being represented online.
Perplexity has expanded its Portable Computer agent, previously Linux-only, to Windows through partnership with Nvidia. The tool requires a GeForce RTX or RTX PRO GPU with at least 24GB of VRAM plus a Perplexity Pro or Max subscription, and runs multistep agent tasks locally instead of in the cloud. The Windows release adds scheduled recurring tasks, local MCP servers for desktop apps, connectors for Word, Drive, Gmail, Slack and GitHub, and one-click local model downloads.
AI search startup Perplexity has shifted its strategy toward building AI agents, and that pivot has helped triple its annualized revenue to $750 million. Nvidia is reportedly now seriously considering an investment in the company.
A study of 380 software categories found that nearly 60% of the sources Perplexity's Sonar models cite when recommending products come from domains ranked outside the top 100,000 sites by traffic, and almost a quarter aren't ranked at all. Three interlinked domains, none older than December 2023 and two with homepages literally titled 'Facts & Grounding Page', have published over 215,000 machine-generated 'best software' pages designed to be retrieved by AI models rather than read by humans.
An audit of Perplexity's Sonar and Sonar-Pro models tested 310 factual questions about 210 tech companies and checked every citation attached to a sentence containing a number. It found that 34.7% of 1,826 such citations linked to pages that either wouldn't load or didn't contain any of the figures stated in the sentence, though scoring by claim rather than by individual citation marker lowered the failure rate to 14.4% of 872 claims.
Perplexity has introduced Hybrid Compute, a feature that divides AI tasks between cloud-based models and models running locally on a user's device. It flags files or data containing personal information and lets users choose to process those locally while sending the rest of the task to the cloud, or send everything to the cloud. The feature currently works only in the Perplexity app on Apple Silicon Macs, supporting local models like Gemma 4 E4B and Qwen 3.6 alongside cloud options such as Claude Opus 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol.
Perplexity has rolled out Hybrid Compute in its Mac app, letting its Computer assistant start tasks in the cloud and shift sensitive steps, like those touching personal files, to a local model running on the Mac itself. An on-device classifier detects personal details such as names and account numbers, replaces them with placeholders before any cloud processing, and restores them once results return. The feature requires Apple silicon, macOS 15 or later, and at least 24GB of unified memory, with 32GB recommended, and uses no cloud credits or API key.
Perplexity has introduced Hybrid Compute, a new feature within its Perplexity Computer platform that divides a single task between a cloud-based frontier model, such as Opus 5 or GPT-5.6 Sol, and a smaller model running locally on a user's Mac. The system automatically flags sensitive files or data and routes them to the local model, while less sensitive parts of the task go to the cloud for stronger reasoning power. Users can review and adjust which files are kept local before the task runs, and choose from local options including Gemma E4B and two Qwen 3.6 variants.
Perplexity has launched a hybrid compute feature for its Computer agentic platform that splits AI tasks between cloud-based frontier models and smaller open-weight models running locally on Apple silicon Macs. Sensitive data is automatically routed to the on-device model via a locally-run 'Privacy Gate' classifier that detects personal information before anything reaches the cloud, without interrupting the task or losing context. The feature launches today for opted-in enterprise customers plus Pro and Max subscribers on Macs running macOS 15 or later.
Perplexity has extended its agentic AI feature, previously exclusive to Mac, to Windows 10 and 11 users on paid Pro, Max, or Enterprise plans. The tool can access local files, control native Windows applications, and connect to cloud services like OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and Dropbox to complete multi-step tasks with minimal user input. A ZDNET reviewer tested it on five complex tasks to gauge its real-world usefulness.