Strategy

We only have 2 planning parameters:

  • 10 year vision
  • 2 week sprint
  • Quarterly OKRs

Ideal Customer

Our ideal customer is an AI enthusiast or business who has experienced some limitations with current AI solutions and is keen to find open source alternatives.

Problems

Our ideal customer would use Jan to solve one of these problems.

Control

  • Control (e.g. preventing vendor lock-in)
  • Stability (e.g. runs predictably every time)
  • Local-use (e.g. for speed, or for airgapped environments)

Privacy

  • Data protection (e.g. personal data or company data)
  • Privacy (e.g. nsfw)

Customisability

  • Tinkerability (e.g. ability to change model, experiment)
  • Niche Models (e.g. fine-tuned, domain-specific models that outperform OpenAI)

Sources: 1 2 3 4

Solution

Jan is a seamless user experience that runs on your personal computer, that glues the different pieces of the open source AI ecosystem to provide an alternative to OpenAI's closed platform.

  • We build a comprehensive, seamless platform that takes care of the technical chores across the stack required to run open source AI
  • We run on top of a local folder of non-proprietary files, that anyone can tinker with (yes, even other apps!)
  • We provide open formats for packaging and distributing AI to run reproducibly across devices

Prerequisites

Footnotes

  1. What are you guys doing that can't be done with ChatGPT? (opens in a new tab) ↩

  2. What's your main interest in running a local LLM instead of an existing API? (opens in a new tab) ↩

  3. Ask HN: What's the best self-hosted/local alternative to GPT-4? (opens in a new tab) ↩

  4. LoRAs (opens in a new tab) ↩