| ▲ | pscanf 12 hours ago | |
> Imagine a world where your data isn’t trapped in distant data centers. Instead, it’s close to home—in a secure data wallet or pod, under your control. Now imagine pairing that with a loyal personal AI assistant, a private, local tool that lives with you, learns from you (with your permission), and acts on your behalf. Your AI. Not theirs. This is almost exactly what I say on the landing page¹ of the product I'm building (an open-source personal database, with an AI assistant on top). I want to believe this can be a reality, and I'm trying to make it become one, but there are two significant challenges: 1. AI = cloud. Taking my app as an example, it'll be at least 2 years before consumer hardware will be able to run the smallest model that performs somewhat decently (gpt-oss-20b). And of course in 2 years that model will be beyond obsolete. Would a regular user pay the price of a subpar experience in order to get data ownership and privacy? It's a very hard sell. 2. Apps/services are very jealous of their users' data. As a user I have to jump through incredible hoops just to get a point-in-time copy of my data. If I can get that at all. There is no incentive for apps to allow their users to own their data. On the contrary, it's better if they don't, so they remain locked in the app. Also, regular Joe and Jane users are not really asking to have access to their data, because there's no benefit for them either. That is, I think, the key to overcome challenge #2: giving regular Joes and Janes an immediate and obvious benefit. If they see that only by owning their data they can do $INCREDIBLY_VALUABLE_THING, then they will themselves start demanding companies access to it, or they will jump through the hoops to get it. (That's the way I'm going about it. I'm nowhere near the end goal, of course, but I see promising results.²) I have no idea how to overcome challenge #1 yet. Mainly because currently there aren't really any big downsides to using cloud models. Or, at least, we haven't seen them yet. Maybe if OpenAI starts injecting ads in GPT-8 responses, people will reconsider using a "stupider" but local, ad-free model. | ||