Why does Jan exist?

Short answer: Open Superintelligence.

Superintelligence will change how we live. Jan exists to build Open Superintelligence that can run on a $1,000 laptop.

The big shiny object: Superintelligence

Everyone in this field is chasing Superintelligence. It’s obviously a civilizational tool in the making, and we’re about to write new defaults.

Given how far-reaching this could be, we should agree it must remain open to everyone. It has to be a common effort that anyone can use and improve.

Jan is part of that effort: we build Open Superintelligence people can run on a laptop, a home server, or the web, and we do the work in public so others can copy, critique, and contribute.

What history teaches

The world is made, and can be remade.

Every industrial wave redefined critical aspects of our daily lives:

• Time & labor: factories introduced shift clocks and wage rhythms
• Scale & power: steam gave way to electricity and standardized parts
• Coordination: rail, telegraph, and later networks changed how decisions travel
• Institutions: each wave pulled new bargains into being skills, schools, safety nets, labor law

So the question is who is going to write the new defaults and share in the gains.

From guilds to standards bodies to open protocols, big leaps happen when people pool methods and maintain commons. If intelligence is built together, its defaults can reflect human needs.

Intelligence as utility

Great tools start rare and awkward, then become ordinary:

• Printing nudged literacy into daily life
• Containerization made trade boring (in the best way)
• TCP/IP let every network speak
• Electricity disappeared into the walls while improving everything it touched

That’s when people stop noticing the tech and only notice the outcome.

Power and Progress

We believe tech doesn’t choose its path, people do. The ones who lead the progress is the ones who own engines power progress.

Progress tilts toward whoever designs, deploys, and profits from the system.

• If intelligence is closed and centralized, the gains concentrate
• If it is open, local, and participatory, the gains spread

We believe in the second one, because history repeats the same lesson:

• Factories lifted owners until schooling and labor law spread gains
• Electrification stayed in cities until co-ops and interconnection standards pushed power outward
• The internet scaled because open protocols beat gated networks

So our take is: closed, centralized systems concentrate value, while open & tinkerable systems spread it. Superintelligence has to follow the same logic.

The pattern is constant: shared rules + falling cost = broad access. Intelligence will follow the same path, and it must be open.

What we’re making at Jan

Jan is one product that bundles models, tools, guardrails, and connectors in a way everybody can run on a laptop, a home server, or the web.

So Jan is:

• Open, so everyone can study, reproduce, improve
• Together, so progress compounds in public
• For everyone, so it runs where people work, under their control

Co-operation > competition

We believe progress is cooperative before it is competitive. People grow by working together.

We’ve chosen to stand on open shoulders. We use, contribute to, and fund open-source projects. When something exists and works, we don’t reinvent the wheel to commercialize it - we upstream fixes, write docs, and make it easier to run.

Open superintelligence is how we make that true at the scale of intelligence.

Happy to see you in this journey. Join our community.