We got tired of renting intelligence.
Every other AI company sells access.
Access can be revoked, repriced, throttled, surveilled,
or deprecated at any time.
You are renting intelligence from someone who can
change the terms whenever they want.
SimpleDirect sells the asset itself.
You download the model. It runs on your machine.
Your data never leaves your network.
No API key, no per-token billing, no terms of service
that update quarterly.
Once you have it, it is yours —
permanently, unconditionally, and irrevocably.
What SimpleDirect is not
Not an API company.
We do not sell inference. We sell the model itself.
Not a platform.
There is no hosted dashboard. No cloud dependency.
Not competing with frontier labs.
We are not building GPT-5. We are building the best model you can actually run, own, and trust on your own hardware.
Not a data company.
Your data stays on your machine. We never see it, collect it, or monetize it.
Not a consulting firm.
We ship software. George writes about ownership. Those are separate.
How we decide
Every product decision gets filtered through one question:
"Does this make it easier for someone to own their AI?"
If yes, do it. If no, kill it.
Model update notifications? Yes
Helps you keep your owned model current.
Cloud inference option? No
That is renting, not owning.
Releasing training datasets? Yes
Lets others train their own models.
Adding telemetry? No
Violates the ownership promise. Permanently.
Per-seat licensing? No
Ownership is not per-seat. It is per-organization.
The team
Vikas Grover
Operations
Ayush Naik
Engineering
Three people. Toronto. AI-first operations.
Where we are on the ladder
We are climbing the same ladder we write about.
Right now we are training models on Canadian GPU clusters in Montreal and Rimouski.
Later this year, colocation. Our own hardware. Fifty steps from the office.
We document every step — real costs, real tradeoffs, real experience. Because nobody else is doing that for people who don't already speak the language.