Perplexity Open-Sources pplx-decider v1.3 Decision Models: New Locate Span Extraction, 91.6% Mean Accuracy Across 63 Classification Tasks for the 26B Model, Apache 2.0, Free on OpenRouter Until November 19
On November 12 Perplexity released pplx-decider-v1.3 (built on Qwen3.8-27B, about 26.1B parameters) and the distilled pplx-decider-flash-v1.3 (built on Qwen3.5-4B, about 4.5B). The weights are on Hugging Face under Apache 2.0, and both models are served through the Decisions API and OpenRouter. The new Locate feature extracts verbatim spans by label or instruction and returns character offsets. Perplexity says v1.3 averages 91.6% accuracy across 63 classification tasks, 6.54 points above its production classifiers.

Key Takeaways
- Two open-weight sizes: v1.3 has about 26.1B parameters (fine-tuned from Qwen3.8-27B) and Flash v1.3 about 4.5B (distilled onto Qwen3.5-4B), both Apache 2.0; running v1.3 locally in BF16 needs about 49 GiB of GPU memory
- New Locate feature: extracts verbatim spans by label or instruction with start and end character offsets and a score, covering NER, PII detection and extractive QA, and can share a request with classification and scoring questions
- Classification (vendor-reported): 91.6% mean accuracy across 63 classification tasks, 6.54 points above Perplexity's production classifiers; ahead of Jev 1.14 in all 7 domains, by up to 12.9 points in finance
- Retrieval and stability: nDCG@10 of 83.99 across 72 retrieval tasks, 1.81 above Qwen3-Reranker-8B; answers changed on only 0.27% of questions under input rewrites, versus 2.69% to 4.84% for Jev 1.14
- Where to get it: Hugging Face downloads, the Perplexity Decisions API, and OpenRouter, where both v1.3 models are free until November 19






