Jan

Jan packages open source AI into a desktop application for people who would rather not send every prompt to a hosted service. Models download from HuggingFace and run on the machine in front of you, with cloud providers available when you actually want them.

The app is built with Tauri and bundles a llama.cpp engine, with build variants for CPU, Vulkan, Metal, CUDA and ROCm. Installers exist for Windows, macOS and Linux in deb and AppImage form, and it is also distributed through the Microsoft Store and Flathub.

The core capabilities are deliberately narrow.

• Local models: runs Llama, Gemma, Qwen, GPT-oss and other LLMs pulled straight from HuggingFace.
• Cloud connections: reaches OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral, Groq, MiniMax and others when a hosted model suits the task better.
• Custom assistants: lets you define specialized assistants for recurring work.
• Local API server: exposes an OpenAI compatible endpoint on port 1337 for other applications to call.
• Model Context Protocol: adds agentic behavior through MCP integration.

Hardware expectations are stated plainly. On macOS 13.6 or later that means 8GB of RAM for 3B models, 16GB for 7B and 32GB for 13B. Building from source needs Node 20, Yarn 4.5.3, Make, Rust and, on Apple silicon, the Metal toolchain, after which a single make target installs dependencies, builds the core and launches the app.