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> If I'm happy with the weights you've given me, and I'm not using your compute for inference and not wanting or needing any updates off you, why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

I definitely understand the appeal of the desire to “buy it once”, but I think there are a few issues:

- almost no software is static. Look at a package like python Requests and even though it does the simplest thing and has barely changed from a user perspective, it gets updated all the time. This is true for most software. This is doubly true for something like local AI models where both the software and the hardware are changing constantly. Subscriptions motivate sellers to keep their software up to date.

- If I’m an app developer, the idea that I can try something out for $X/month is very appealing versus making an upfront investment of (let’s say) $X*20. This is doubly true for something like local models where I will almost certainly want something new when the models improve.

- To add to the first point, I work at a startup. No one asks questions when I want $20/month licenses. But let’s say I want something that’s gonna be in the 5 figure range annually. If I go to my CFO and ask for $50k upfront and then we implement something and the project fails, I look like an idiot. If I ask for $2000/mo budget for something and then we try it for two months and it fails, no one cares. Subscriptions are just safer in this sense.

How is it not obvious and fair that they are asking you to pay them when you see success (defined as >100K MAU)? How more aligned can you and them be besides this?

> These local models are like old school software. They're producing the weights, and then giving them to people. If I'm happy with the weights you've given me, and I'm not using your compute for inference and not wanting or needing any updates off you, why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

You are, presumably, making copies of their software for your customers. So I guess the real question here is, should copyright exist? For software?

As far as I can see there is no clear pricing once you go beyond the free tier - it's contact sales.

This is actually a classic enterprise software approach - as there are no fixed per unit production costs to cover, the pricing is very elastic.

ie each license is probably a negotiation - if you see your app for a one off fee then they want a one-off cut - if you sell a subscription they may want a cut of that instead.

Obviously the risk is if you bake it in and your app becomes successful they may want a larger cut than you can afford, but if they don't negotiate in good faith they won't last very long.

How would a model where you pay per each model/weight update feel like? More similar to traditional software, where you'd get the current version, maybe even free/rebated version upgrade to the next, but then have to do another purchase to get the latest version? Or something similar to that?

Feels like it'd be more aligned with how the business and users would produce and use it, it'd be something like: "We've done a bunch of research and output, here is the thing, you can buy it, and we'll work on the next, then you can pay again for the next if you'd like".

> If I'm happy with the weights you've given me, and I'm not using your compute for inference and not wanting or needing any updates off you, why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

Because they own the IP and they get to decide the terms of how it’s licensed.

This is like a company taking open source software, saying they like the code the community has given them, and asking why they should continue having to respect the terms of the license after downloading the code. The availability of the software (or models) does not equal a free license to use as you please.

A license allowing 100K devices for free is very generous. The businesses selling more than 100K units of anything will be significant operations. It’s fair that they’re asked to contribute financially.

> If I'm happy with the weights you've given me, and I'm not using your compute for inference and not wanting or needing any updates off you, why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

What do you mean by "continue" if you haven't paid anything yet at that point?

> why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

Welcome to the concept of fair market value. Less snarkily you're conflating the concepts of price and cost; theyre not the same thing and theyre not the same for you or the seller.

> If I'm happy with the weights you've given me, and I'm not using your compute for inference and not wanting or needing any updates off you, why should you continue getting money off me and my customers?

Because that's the contract you agreed to?

If you don't like the contract they offer, don't take it. You can choose something else. It's really as simple as that.

The founders and website seems to talk a lot about mobile devices and how many are being sold/shipped, that's the "unused compute power" they're targeting. So obviously mobile-first platforms and SDKs seem to be the focus first, hence those languages. Understandable, given their target, but just like you I wish there was an easier way to give it a try on a desktop computer.

Same, just wish I could afford the computer to train my own ngl

It's an ANE optimized version of Parakeet, with our own inference, which enabled us to push performance to about 300x realtime speed on an iPhone 16/17. Our next gen Voz model is trained from scratch and will be at least twice as fast. Android and other platforms will land soon.

This seems to be a common theme with these "European sovereign AI" companies. Mostly built on top of other open source work and slightly adjusted, often to collect grant money (although I'm not sure about that last part in this case).

Nice, now I know what I actually need.

I was also thinking that this is almost too good to be true

Just a few are iOS first (pure practical timing/sequencing). We plan to make all models available cross-platform in the coming weeks.

The underlying model (DFNet3) is not particularly great but it is very small and fast - imo the best commercially usable denoising model is MossFormer2 (no affiliation - it's just excellent) with one drawback in that it can't remove reverb.

Nvidia's RE-USE model can do what MossFormer2 does _and_ can remove reverb, but it is non-commercial licensed.

It is now also reasonably straightforward if you have access to frontier LLMs, a recent-ish mac and a recent-ish iPhone to point them at the job of porting a given model to run on the ANE - it's a reasonably easy task to hill-climb at this point!

AI beige theme and obnoxious AI writing signaled as much.

but they're European!

seems to be…

I don't think you understood. It means these are specialized models. Their toxic model could be ideal for video game lobbies without investing a ton of money if you're an indie dev

This also could be ideal if you want your child to play online to have auto-censorship

1. Not having human in the loop to review it because humans are expensive.

2. Having human in the loop to review it and subject said human to the worst other humans produce.

OCR on steroids. Our Schemer model will soon be available (free form text to structured JSON). Once that lands, we want to jump into image to JSON.

You should check out IBM's Docling.

We plan to make most our models available for Android and web too. Some are a bit harder to port to the different platforms and will take a bit longer to properly land on Android or web. Mostly sequencing (Voz, Clips, Title). Soon!

It does say this: "Certain by script: these characters belong to only one language, so the model never ran."

So I think it's some buggy code in their UI that even prevents the model from running.

Thanks!