Running a decision AI on a Mac
Perplexity on Oct. 22 (Oct. 23 Japan time) released "Decider for Mac," an app that runs the small decision-only AI "pplx-decider-flash-v1.2" on Macs. The model runs on the device, and no API key is required. The company's X account for developers, @perplexitydevs, announced it.
Instead of writing text, a decision-only AI returns answers to questions as probabilities. To a question such as whether an inquiry is a refund request, it answers with yes and no probabilities or probabilities for each option. It is suited to large volumes of work with clear criteria, such as routing inquiries, labeling data and screening posts.
4 billion parameters, with weights released
pplx-decider-flash-v1.2 is a small model with 4 billion parameters, released on Oct. 16. It was built on China's Alibaba's "Qwen3.5-4B," with knowledge transferred from the company's 27-billion-parameter decision model. It reads text, JSON and images and answers 1 to 128 questions at a time. The weights are released under the Apache 2.0 license and can be used commercially.
When used through the API, it costs $0.01 per million input tokens, and output is free. That is one-tenth of the $0.10 for input on the "Decisions API" for decisions, which OpenAI made generally available on the same day. In Vals AI's evaluation of decisions on financial documents, it scored 96.5% accuracy, ranking 11th among 14 decision models.
| Item | Perplexity pplx-decider-flash-v1.2 | OpenAI Decisions API |
|---|---|---|
| Input (per million tokens) | $0.01 | $0.10 |
| Output | Free | No charge |
| Weights released | Yes | No |
| Runs on a local Mac | Yes | No |
