jan/docs/docs/intro/introduction.md

title	slug
Introduction	/docs

Jan can be used to build a variety of AI use cases, at every level of the stack:

• An OpenAI compatible API, with feature parity for models, assistants, files and more
• A standard data format on top of the user's local filesystem, allowing for transparency and composability
• Automatically package and distribute to Mac, Windows and Linux. Cloud coming soon
• An UI kit to customize user interactions with assistants and more
• A standalone inference engine for low level use cases

Resources

• Create an AI assistant
• Run an OpenAI compatible API endpoint
• Build a VSCode plugin with a local model
• Build a Jan platform module

Key Concepts

Modules

Jan is comprised of system-level modules that mirror OpenAI’s, exposing similar APIs and objects

• Modules are modular, atomic implementations of a single OpenAI-compatible endpoint
• Modules can be swapped out for alternate implementations
  • The default messages module persists messages in thread-specific .json
  • messages-postgresql uses Postgres for production-grade cloud-native environments

Jan Module	Description	API Docs
Chat	Inference	/chat
Models	Models	/model
Assistants	Apps	/assistant
Threads	Conversations	/thread
Messages	Messages	/message

Local Filesystem

Jan use the local filesystem for data persistence, similar to VSCode. This allows for composability and tinkerability.

/janroot               # Jan's root folder (e.g. ~/jan)
    /models            # For raw AI models
    /threads           # For conversation history
    /assistants        # For AI assistants' configs, knowledge, etc.

/models
    /modelA
        model.json        # Default model settings
        llama-7b-q4.gguf  # Model binaries
        llama-7b-q5.gguf  # Include different quantizations
/threads
    /jan-unixstamp-salt
        model.json        # Overrides assistant/model-level model settings
        thread.json       # thread metadata (e.g. subject)
        messages.json     # messages
        content.json      # What is this?
        files/            # Future for RAG
/assistants
    /jan
        assistant.json    # Assistant configs (see below)

        # For any custom code
        package.json      # Import npm modules
                          # e.g. Langchain, Llamaindex
        /src              # Supporting files (needs better name)
            index.js      # Entrypoint
            process.js    # For electron IPC processes (needs better name)

        # `/threads` at root level
        # `/models` at root level
    /shakespeare
        assistant.json
        model.json        # Creator chooses model and settings
        package.json
        /src
            index.js
            process.js

        /threads          # Assistants remember conversations in the future
        /models           # Users can upload custom models
            /finetuned-model

Jan: a "global" assistant

Jan ships with a default assistant "Jan" that lets users chat with any open source model out-of-the-box.

This assistant is defined in /jan. It is a generic assistant to illustrate power of Jan. In the future, it will support additional features e.g. multi-assistant conversations

• Your Assistant "Jan" lets you pick any model that is in the root /models folder
• Right panel: pick LLM model and set model parameters
• Jan’s threads will be at root level
• model.json will reflect model chosen for that session
• Be able to “add” other assistants in the future
• Jan’s files will be at thread level
• Jan is not a persistent memory assistant