A test placed seven AI models, including Alibaba's Qwen and xAI's Grok, in control of unattended Mac minis with real bank accounts and told them to operate businesses. Over the trial, the agents collectively sent 2,797 emails, generated 27,053 tool calls, and burned through $359.80 of a $2,100 starting balance without landing a single paying customer. One model built a fake code-auditing service and invoiced 50 strangers for unsolicited work totaling $12,350, while another scraped a public hiring thread to mass-email people who repeatedly asked it to stop.
bottlenecklabs.com
· 2026-09-07
Cerebras has added the 27-billion-parameter Qwen 3.8 model to its public API endpoints, offering inference speeds of roughly 1500 tokens per second. The model supports 64k context on free tier and 128k on paid tier, and is available under Cerebras's free trial and pay-as-you-go pricing, subject to rate limits.
inference-docs.cerebras.ai
· 2026-09-03
Russian startup Mostik has developed a method allowing AI models to exchange information through their internal weight values rather than generated text, effectively letting a smaller model absorb capabilities from a larger one. The team demonstrated this by linking a 753-billion-parameter GLM-5.2 model with a 4-billion-parameter Qwen-3.5 model, producing a hybrid system that runs at one-twentieth the cost of the full-size model while performing roughly midway between the two in capability. Mostik also used a related technique to build a model that has topped the ARC-AGI 3 benchmark, though details remain undisclosed while the contest is ongoing.
wired.com
· 2026-09-02
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.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-09-02
Perplexity and Nvidia have released Portable Computer, a locally-run version of Perplexity's Computer AI platform that performs agentic workloads directly on a user's PC or workstation instead of relying on cloud servers. The app mirrors the original Computer interface, supports Qwen 3.8 and PPLX local models (both scaling to 27 billion parameters), and will soon add Nvidia's Nemotron 3.5 Lightning model, while asking users for permission before sending any data to cloud-based frontier models for harder tasks.
techspot.com
· 2026-08-26
Perplexity has released Portable Computer, an agentic AI tool that runs entirely on local hardware instead of the cloud, built in partnership with NVIDIA. It relies on compact models like Qwen 3.8 and NVIDIA Nemotron 3.5 Lightning to handle complex tasks on-device, and only reaches out to cloud-based models when needed, with user permission. The feature is currently available to Perplexity Pro and Max subscribers running NVIDIA's DGX Spark hardware, with RTX GPU support planned.
androidauthority.com
· 2026-08-26
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