“That’s how Osaurus started,” Pae, previously a software engineer at Tesla and Netflix, told TechCrunch over a call. The idea, he explained, was to try to run an AI assistant locally. “You can do pretty much everything on your Mac locally, like browsing your files, accessing your browser, accessing your system configurations. I figured this would be a great way to position Osaurus as a personal AI for individuals.”

Pae began building the tool in public as an open source project, adding features and fixing bugs along the way.

Today, Osaurus can flexibly connect with locally hosted AI models or cloud providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. Users can freely choose which AI models they’re using and keep other aspects of the AI experience on their own hardware, like the models’ own memory, or their files and tools.

Given that different AI models have different strengths, the advantage of this system is that users can switch to the AI model that best fits their needs.