Tales from the bench

On January 16, 2026 -- a Friday afternoon before the MLK holiday weekend -- OpenAI quietly announced that ChatGPT would begin showing advertisements. Eight months earlier, they spent $6.5 billion to acquire Jony Ive's hardware startup. They're building a device with cameras and microphones designed to be on your person at all times.

But this isn't a post about OpenAI. They're just the latest. Google, Amazon, Meta, and now OpenAI -- every company building the next AI assistant is funded by advertising. And every one of them is building hardware designed to see and hear everything around you, all day, every day.

Local on-device inference is the only way off the track.

Last Tuesday, Juno heard my family say over 800 things. It remembered 12.

Juno is an ambient AI assistant in a smart display that sits on our kitchen counter (with everything happening on-device and no cloud dependencies). It listens to the room all day, no wake word, and tries to extract useful memories (appointments, shopping lists, events, etc) to build household context.

We've been building the memory system over about 3 generations and the thing that surprised me most is where the actual engineering difficulty lives. It's not in storing memories or retrieving them (KISS and use markdown). It's in figuring out what to throw away.

The Juno prototype that sits on a family's kitchen counter right now is an iPad, a USB-C speakerphone, and a power adapter. That's the whole thing. Three items in a padded mailer. The family plugs it in, opens an app, and they have an always-listening AI assistant on their counter by dinner.

The inference? That runs on a rented A10 GPU at Lambda, hundreds of miles from their kitchen.

This will bother you if you've read anything else we've written, because Juno's entire promise is that nothing leaves your home. No cloud. Local inference. Privacy as architecture, not policy. And here I am telling you the prototype streams audio to a data center. I know.

Juno exists to give every person and every household a personal intelligence that knows them completely—and works entirely for them.

We believe the path to that future runs through one uncompromising commitment: always-on context. Your Juno listens, sees, and remembers so that it can act on your behalf with the full picture—no repeated explanations, no lost threads.