Blog
Notes on AI you can own
Private AI, open models, and what we learn putting both on hardware that sits on your desk instead of in someone else's data center.
Offline Base
What Offline Base is building, and what you can use today
Who Offline Base is, the three products in development and where each stands, and the free demos and programs that work right now.
Products
Base Drive, private AI for the laptop you already own
A planned $19.99 USB drive, not yet orderable, that sets up private, offline AI on an Apple Silicon Mac or Windows 11 laptop. How it works, as of October 2026.
Privacy
How Base Drive earns the trust a USB drive needs
What Base Drive does to earn a careful person's trust: listed files, SHA-256 checksums and no telemetry, plus the limits.
Guides
How much memory a local AI model needs
How to tell whether a local AI model fits your computer, using 4-bit file sizes, RAM, drive space and the two models on Base Drive.
Products
Base Router, the always-on AI box we are designing
A preview of Base Router, a planned $400 private AI box built on a Jetson Orin Nano Super, with its speed targets, its limits and its consent design.
Local AI
Inside the Jetson Orin Nano Super, the computer behind Base Router
The NVIDIA board behind Base Router, our /try demo and our fleet: its specs, price history, how fast it runs language models and why 8 GB means small models.
Guides
What on-premises AI changes for clinics, law firms and schools, and where it stops
A plain guide for law firms, clinics and schools on what on-premises AI changes, what stays your job, and where Offline Base stands in October 2026.
Products
Decision Tree, a little bonsai with a decision model inside
A small bonsai with a private decision model that answers quick questions about text or photos on your home network. Coming soon, with no price yet.
Local AI
Two weeks of real traffic on our Jetson fleet
What the first two weeks of real requests looked like on our rack of Jetson Orin Nano boards, read from the live feed behind our /fleet page.
Research
How a decision model picks between our Jetsons and the cloud
What a decision model is, how Liquid AI's d1-3B routes chats on our Jetson fleet, and where the cloud handoff shows up on /fleet.
Local AI
Gemma Gemini, a free chat that shows which model answered and why
Our free chat sends each message to Gemma 4 E2B on our Jetsons or Gemini 4 Argon in the cloud, and every reply says which one answered and why.
Products
Three things you can try on offlinebase.com without an account
A hands-on tour of the live demos on offlinebase.com: a chat on a Jetson, 10 open-weight models and a small model that rewrites the site.
Guides
What zero data retention means, and where it stops
Zero data retention is a promise a cloud provider makes about your request. How our /open chat enforces it, and which features fall outside it.
Privacy
How the Base phone app keeps your chats on your phone
What the Base app privacy policy and iPhone support page say about where your prompts, voice, photos and files go, plus the one Web Search exception.
Research
What a million real questions say about small local models
The research behind our belief that small local models are good enough, from Stanford, Hugging Face and our benchmarks page, with the limits.
Research
The energy case for local AI, with our caveats
Why we think local AI answers part of the data-center problem, the per-answer math behind it, one real fleet reading, and the caveats we publish with it.
Offline Base
Building AI for people who are wary of AI
Why Offline Base builds for AI skeptics, what Pew and Gallup found in 2026, and how owned, local AI and hands-on teaching answer them.
Privacy
Why we make local the default for private AI
People share private things with chatbots even when they worry about it. Our answer is a local default, with outside help only when the owner approves.
Offline Base
What renting AI costs when the terms change
Dated cases where people lost AI they relied on, from Humane's AI Pin to GPT-4o and Claude Fable 5, and what owning your AI looks like.
Offline Base
How our computer buyback works, and where your old machine goes
How our photo-in buyback for old desktops, laptops and graphics cards works, what we take, how you get paid and what happens to your data.