“Local-first” is having a moment — and it’s worth reading the label. Most apps in this category keep your data on your machine (notes, files, a knowledge graph) but send your prompts to a cloud model — typically Anthropic’s Claude or OpenAI’s models — to actually generate answers. That means internet, an API key or subscription, and your prompts leaving your device. Outlier runs the model itself on your Mac. That’s the harder thing, and it’s the whole point.
When an assistant calls itself local-first, it can mean one of two things, and they are not close:
| Cloud-wrapped “local” assistants | Outlier | |
|---|---|---|
| Where your data lives | On your machine | On your machine |
| Where the model runs | Anthropic / OpenAI servers | On your Mac (Apple MLX) |
| Do your prompts leave the device? | Yes — every request | No (optional cloud escalation only if you enable it) |
| Works offline / on a plane? | No | Yes |
| Needs a subscription or API key to think? | Yes | No |
| Ongoing cost | Per-token / monthly | Free after the one-time download |
Because running a frontier-scale model on a laptop is the hard part. It is far easier to build a nice desktop app and call Claude’s or OpenAI’s API for the intelligence. That is a legitimate product — but it is a cloud product with a local front-end. Your code and questions still travel to a third party, you still need a paid plan, and it still stops working on a plane or behind a firewall. Outlier did the part those apps skip: a real on-device inference engine, from a 4 GB Nano model up to a paged Mixture-of-Experts tier that streams a very large model within the RAM of a 64 GB Apple Silicon Mac.
Outlier is local-first with optional cloud, which is the inverse of a cloud wrapper. By default the model runs on your Mac and nothing leaves the device. Cloud escalation is a single opt-in setting: if you add your own API key and turn it on, a task the on-device model genuinely can’t finish is retried on a cloud model — so you get a Claude-quality answer on the hard tail without ever hitting a wall. It is off by default, never runs in private mode, and only fires on a real local failure. A cloud-wrapped assistant is the opposite: the cloud is the only mode, and there is no off switch.
If you want a knowledge-graph productivity layer and you don’t mind that the AI runs on someone else’s servers with a subscription, a cloud-wrapped assistant is fine. If you want the AI to actually run on your machine — private by default, free, offline-capable, with the option to reach for the cloud only when you decide — that is the specific thing Outlier is built to do, and the thing a cloud wrapper structurally cannot.
Cloud-wrapped “local” assistants keep your data local and send your prompts to Anthropic or OpenAI. Outlier runs the model on your Mac — local by default, cloud only if you turn it on.
Download Outlier for MacRequires Apple Silicon (M1, M2, M3, or M4) — Intel Macs are not supported. macOS 12+.
Outlier runs on your Mac. Nothing leaves the device unless you turn on cloud escalation. macOS 12+ on Apple Silicon (arm64). Apache 2.0 model weights. Back to home.