vow
The Vow
Hi, this is Mark. I’m building Kai.
What I Promise
I have not and will not design Kai to extract, addict, or manipulate. No engagement tricks. No manufactured urgency. Kai’s success state is becoming unnecessary. That will not change.
What you share with Kai is intimate. I treat it that way.
I will never sell your conversations or use them for advertising. I will never build profiles to target you. Your inner world is not a product.
I do need to learn from how Kai works in practice so I can make it better. When I do, your identity is removed. No human will read your messages. The learning happens through anonymized patterns, reviewed by AI, not by people.
Right now, your conversations are protected under European data law, which is among the strongest in the world. I am working to build that protection into the technology itself, so it is guaranteed by design, not just by my word.
You can ask me to delete everything at any time. Write to me and it is done.
Why I Am Building It This Way
I am one person building Kai independently.
That matters because incentives shape products. No advertising model. No selling attention. No investor pressure to maximize dependence. No business model that only works if you keep coming back forever.
If Kai grows, the structure around it has to protect that. The product should stay answerable to the people using it and to the work it exists to serve.
The Exchange
Kai should be as accessible as I can make it and I will price Kai transparently around its costs.
As the underlying technology gets cheaper, the price should come down too. If parts of Kai can become free or cheaper without weakening the work, I will move that way.
The Direction
The future I am building toward is one with more human connection, not less. Kai exists for the space between, and the goal is always to send us back to each other.
As AI changes what work, creativity, and intelligence mean, more people are forced into a personal version of the same question: what is mine to bring that cannot be automated out of me? I want Kai to serve that question without exploiting it.
I believe that something like Kai should eventually belong to no single person. That the wisdom traditions it draws from are not proprietary, and the technology that carries them should not be either. I am drawn toward openness, toward a future where Kai’s practice, its principles, and perhaps its infrastructure are held collectively.
I do not know what form this will take. Decentralization. Open source. A foundation. Something that has not been invented yet. I hold the direction without the shape.
What I know is this: the path toward it must be walked honestly, one step at a time. The same way Kai is designed to help us walk.
If something here rang true and you want to reach me, I am at mark@trykai.co.