Everyone's racing to make AI bigger. I think the entire direction is wrong — and I built the proof.

I've spent 18 months building DigitalOman.ai, and it started from watching the AI industry sprint, full speed, in what I'm convinced is the wrong direction.

Look at how this is actually being funded. The boom runs on the same fuel as every bubble before it — debt, circular financing, valuations betting on a perfect future. Companies are burning billions faster than projected, buying up nuclear plants, and now seriously pitching orbital data centres just to keep the servers powered. Your "$20 a month" is subsidised by investors who fully intend to raise the price the moment you can't live without it. And the cheapest product these companies sell isn't the AI — it's you. Your data trains it. Your privacy pays for it.

Everyone treats "bigger, further away, more centralised" as the only path. I think the right path was always the opposite: smaller, closer, and yours.

So instead of renting a brain that lives on someone else's computer, I built one that runs directly on your device — fully offline, no account, nothing collected. No internet? It still answers, because the model lives on your phone, not on a server you're paying to access. Want the big cloud models too? Bring your own key (or your own self-hosted model, local or in the cloud) and it talks straight to them — nothing passes through me, because there's no middle to pass through. It's free. No ads, no paywall, no token meter waiting to triple next year.

The part I'm proudest of is invisible: the reason most people quietly give up on on-device AI is memory — small local models forget the start of the conversation halfway through and slow to a crawl as the chat grows. I built a custom memory-management, conversation, and caching system to fix exactly that, so local models stay coherent and fast on a phone. That's where most of the 18 months went.

And it's not just a chat box. On top of it sits a shelf of mini-apps I call InApps, all offline-capable and private: an AI Academy (learn any subject, upload your own notes, run mock interviews off your resume, even sit MCQ and descriptive exams), AI Search (an offline or internet-based answer engine with a web assistant), AI Gallery (pulls AI-generated images from the web by your search or taste), a Game Hub (describe a game, the AI builds it, you play), plus Mail Assistant, Notes AI, To-Do and Transcribe. One private app doing the work people currently scatter across a dozen cloud services.

It's live right now on iPhone, iPad, and Android.

Since I am constantly trying to figure out how to make DigitalOman.ai the best! I genuinely want your opinions and feedback.

Thank you in advance.