Perplexity just shipped an agent model/orchestrator model， that matches near-frontier performance at one-third the cost of Opus.
"GLM 5.2 + advisor"， its a tuned version of GLM 5.2， retrained specifically for Perplexity Computer， its agent environment.
Running frontier models like Opus 4.8 or GPT-5.5 on every task gets expensive fast.
So the cheaper base handles most work， then escalates to a stronger model only when it needs help.
That escalation runs through a built-in advisor tool that decides when the extra horsepower is worth calling.
On Terminal-Bench 2.1 the setup scores 80， ahead of Opus 4.8 at 76 and GPT-5.5 at 78.
But cost is where the numbers turn.
On WANDR the advisor build runs at 2.1x the GLM 5.2 baseline， while Opus burns 6.1x.
Averaged across benchmarks， it costs roughly half what Opus does per task.
Perplexity hosts it in the U.S. on Nvidia B200 GPUs， with fuller benchmarks promised soon.
The interesting move is treating a strong model as an on-call consultant with an escalation logic， not the default worker.