With ~90 % market share, ChatGPT enjoys an immense data flywheel: every conversation sharpens its answers, deepens personalization, and raises switching costs. It’s a sticky ecosystem most users will never leave.
But there’s a growing minority—maybe just 5 % of the market, yet still tens of millions—who want something different: full control over their own chat history and the freedom to choose whichever LLM best suits a task. Crucially, they don’t want a “for‑geeks‑only” workaround. They expect the same friction‑free elegance they already get from ChatGPT.
A “control‑unit” for everyone #
Think of the control unit “Brain Ball” in Westworld: a portable core that stores every memory a host has ever formed and can be inserted into any body. Your chat history is a digital Brain Ball of sorts—a personal memory vault that, with the right retrieval algorithms, can let an AI recall your past instantly and accurately.
Now imagine a platform where:
- You own that Brain Ball. Your data lives in an open, portable format.
- RAG pipelines pull insights from your entire memory bank on demand—no config files, no arcane API keys.
- Model‑swapping is a click, not a chore. Choose GPT‑4o for creative writing, Gemini for code, or an open‑source model hosted locally—seamlessly.
- All of it feels as smooth as ChatGPT. No geek badge required.
A few niche tools nibble at pieces of this vision, but today there’s no shared protocol—or consumer‑grade UX—that ties it all together.
Why this matters beyond chat #
Even if tomorrow’s AI agents move past text chat—think voice, AR overlays, background task orchestration—the demand to own and port your personal data will remain. A self‑hosted Brain Ball ensures you’re never locked into one vendor’s walled garden, no matter how interaction paradigms evolve.
I believe the next breakout product will marry data sovereignty with consumer‑level polish, turning that Westworld‑style control unit into a practical reality.
What do you think? Will user‑owned “Brain Balls” become a cornerstone of the AI future, or will convenience keep most of us inside closed ecosystems?