---
title: "Why Jan exists"
description: "Short answer: Open Superintelligence."
---

# Why does Jan exist?

import { Callout } from 'nextra/components'

<Callout type="info">
Short answer: Open Superintelligence.
</Callout>

In 1879, [Edison](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Edison) lit a single street in [Menlo Park](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Menlo_Park,_California). What mattered wasn't the bulb. It was that power could reach homes, schools, and factories.  

Electricity changed the world only when it became universal. Standard plugs, cheap generation, lines everywhere. People stopped talking about electricity and started using light, cold chains, and machines.

[Superintelligence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superintelligence) is the same kind of story. The point is who gets the power, on what terms, and at what cost. If intelligence is open, portable, and cheap, it becomes a utility. If it isn’t, it becomes a gate.

Jan exists to push intelligence toward the first path: Open Superintelligence you can run on your cheap laptop.

## What history teaches

> The world is made, and can be remade.

Every industrial wave redefined new defaults of our daily lives:
- [Factories](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factory) created the modern job
- [Electricity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity) created the modern home
- [Railroads](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rail_transport#History) and [telegraphs](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telegraphy#History) created the modern nation
- [The Internet](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet) created the modern world

Open Superintelligence will create what comes next. What we're interested in is who is going to write the new defaults and share in the gains. 

Technology doesn’t choose its path, people do. Power accrues to 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 choose the second.

## What we're making at Jan
Jan is building Open Superinteligence. It's one product that bundles models, tools, guardrails, and connectors in a way everybody can run on a laptop, a home server, or the web.

- Open-source, so everyone can study, reproduce, improve
- Building together, so progress compounds in public
- AI 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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_on_the_shoulders_of_giants). 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](https://discord.gg/Exe46xPMbK).