About Jan

Jan is a open-source, local-first tool to create, customize and use AI for everyday tasks.

You can:

• Run locally using open-source LLMs or connect to cloud AIs like ChatGPT or Google
• Fine-tune AI with specific knowledge
• Search the web and other databases
• Connect AI to your everyday tools and (with your permission) do work on your behalf

Longer-term, Jan is building a cognitive framework for future robots. We envision a world where we have personal or company robots that we continually improve and customize, growing together with us.

Why do we exist

At Jan, our mission is to advance human-machine collaboration. We achieve this through delivering the best open-source, local-first tools to allow users to run, customize and tinker with AI.

What's different about it?

	Status Quo	Jan
Ownership	AI Monopolies owned by Big Tech	AI that you own and control
Openness?	Closed-source	Open-source (AGPLv3)
Your role	Consume	Create, Tinker and Customize
Approach	Cloud	Local-first, running 100% on your devices
Data	Data stored on their servers	Data stored in your local filesystem in open, non-proprietary file formats
Privacy	😂	Runs 100% on your own machine, predictably, privately and offline
Transparency	"Black Box"	Runs predictability with code available to tinker and customize
What happens if there's an outage or goes out of business?	Your life's work held hostage in the cloud in proprietary data formats1	Continues to run 100% on your computer, your data is safe in your local folder
Driving Philosophy	Monetize your users	Privacy as a human right and the Right to Repair

How do I get it?

You can install and start using Jan in less than 5 minutes, from jan.ai or our Github repo.

You can read the User Guide if you need some help to get started.

What license is the code under?

Jan is licensed under the AGPLv3 License.

We happily accept pull requests, however, we do ask that you sign a Contributor License Agreement so that we have the right to relicense your contributions².

We also have a Contributor Program to provide ownership and upside to contributors who have made significant contributions to the project.

What was it built with?

Jan is pragmatically built using Typescript at the application level and C++ at the Inference level (which we have refactored into Nitro³).

We follow clean architecture and currently support multiple frameworks and runtimes:

• A desktop client with Electron
• A headless server-mode with Nodejs
• Planned support for mobile with Capacitor
• Planned support for Python runtime

Architecturally, we have made similar choices to the Next.js Enterprise Javascript Stack, which is a battle-tested framework for building enterprise-grade applications that scale.

tip

At its core, Jan is a software development kit to build and run copilots on personal devices. The Desktop Client many folks use is, rather, a specific set of extensions packaged by default. We're excited to see what developers do with the SDK (once its in better shape).

Contact

Drop us a message in our Discord and we'll get back to you.

• #general: for general discussion
• #get-help: for bug reports and troubleshooting
• #roadmap: for feature requests and ideas

Footnotes

Footnotes

1. Credit to Obsidian's original website ↩

2. Credit to Discourse's About Page ↩

3. Credit to Llama.cpp, TensorRT-LLM, vLLM, LMDeploy and more. ↩