Perplexity says it has released a research preview of a lower-cost orchestrator model that can escalate to a frontier model inside its Computer harness, according to a company post on X and posts from CEO Arav Srinivas. Srinivas wrote that, when paired with an advisor, the model performs at "Opus 4.8 grade performance at a fraction of the cost," while adding in a follow-up post that the model is still being trained and that more details are coming in a research paper and blog.