Little brains in every product

We carry more compute in our hands than sits in the entire cloud, yet almost all the money flows to data centers. For five years we've built on-device first at Detail and Subwave, shipping local rendering, captions, and enhancement while keeping video on the device. Through NP-Hard we backed Mirai, pushing LLM inference to 1,000 tokens per second, and at Detail we use Argmax's on-device speech models. The building blocks exist, but there's still a wide gap between what developers want to build and what's actually available to them. Every developer I spoke to at WWDC had the same story: a wish list of AI features they'd build if inference cost weren't a factor, and expensive cloud tokens they'd happily swap for a local model running on the device already in their user's pocket. The demand is real. The SDKs aren't there yet. That's why we're launching Desert Ant Labs, a European on-device AI lab focused on shipping dozens of small, opinionated audio and visual models that drop into any product with a few lines of code. No inference cost, nothing leaving the device, running on the 6 billion devices people already own. When cost drops to zero, you stop trading capability against budget on every feature decision. The first models already power Detail and Subwave, and a dozen more will be available to third-party developers before the end of the year. Published on Subwave https://subwave.app/@paul/post/little-brains-in-every-product