Why Local-First Matters for Personal AI
The promise of AI assistants is compelling: ask a question, get an answer drawn from everything you've ever written, read, or discussed. But most implementations require sending your most private data—your notes, emails, meeting transcripts—to someone else's servers.
We think there's a better way.
The Privacy Problem
When you use a cloud-based AI assistant, every query you make, every document you upload, and every piece of context you provide passes through infrastructure you don't control. Even with the best intentions and strongest encryption, this creates risks:
- Data breaches — Your personal knowledge becomes a target
- Policy changes — Terms of service can change overnight
- Training data — Your inputs may improve models you don't benefit from
- Vendor lock-in — Your data becomes harder to move
The Local-First Alternative
Local-first means your data stays on your machine. The AI models run on your hardware. The indexes are built locally. Nothing leaves your device unless you explicitly choose to sync it.
This isn't just about privacy—it's about ownership. Your personal knowledge base should be as portable as a folder of files. You should be able to inspect it, export it, or delete it at any time.
Why Now?
For years, running sophisticated AI models locally was impractical. The models were too large, the hardware too slow. But that's changing rapidly:
- Apple Silicon makes local inference fast and efficient
- Smaller, specialized models match larger ones for specific tasks
- Embedding models run efficiently on consumer hardware
- Vector databases can be built and queried locally
The technology has caught up with the philosophy. Local-first AI isn't a compromise anymore—it's a choice.
What We're Building
Nexus Note is a local-first intelligence layer over your digital life. Everything—ingestion, indexing, reasoning, and action—happens on your Mac. We're not building another cloud service that happens to have a desktop app. We're building software that respects your privacy by default.
If this resonates with you, join our waitlist. We're building this for people who think for a living and care about where their thoughts go.