Introducing Bonsai

AI promised to give us more agency, so why do most of us feel like we’re getting left behind? It seems that every new model release widens the gap between what I can do with the technology and what it’s able to do by itself. I’m still working on drafting emails that sound like me. I haven’t gotten a chance to solve any millennium problems yet.

Today’s AI products demand too much. You need to build skills, create context files, know which model to use for which task, and you don’t get any feedback to know whether you’re even doing it right. There’s so much more to learn, and with every new blog post highlighting the “right way” to do things, the learning curve feels steeper.

I encountered this anxiety almost daily running internal AI at Ramp. The sneaking feeling that there are decisions being made that will have an impact on your life which are beyond your understanding and therefore your control.

You deserve to be more than a spectator to your own disruption. To be empowered to shape this change, not just be shaped by it.

That’s why we're building Bonsai.

Everyone can be a builder

I’ve seen what happens to people when they build something that once required an expert. It changes how they view themselves, bolsters their self-confidence, and expands the ambition of their ideas.

This is the part of the AI story that gets me excited. Not just doing the same work faster, but showing people that they are capable of more. Giving them the ability to explore new ideas, build new products, and take on projects that were previously impossible.

It’s time to change how we measure progress. The frontier must accelerate more than just the intelligence of the models. It must accelerate what you can do with them.

AI should adapt to you

Working with AI today is hard because it’s unlike any tool we’ve used before. Its possibilities can’t be captured in menus and buttons, so you’re given an empty chat box and expected to figure out what to do with it.

Getting good results means knowing what to ask, how to ask for it, and how to create an environment that tells AI how you think and what rules to follow. Few people know how to do this.

A good AI product should learn with its user. It should help you discover what AI can do, while learning how you think, work, and create. Every interaction should make the next one better, so that while you get better at using AI, the AI gets better at working with you.

This feedback loop matters. Better results build confidence. Confidence encourages experimentation. Experimentation builds skill. AI shouldn’t just do things for you; it should expand what you’re able to do yourself.

What it learns should belong to you

What AI learns about you is valuable. We've seen this story before with social media, where companies built addictive products to monetize your data. AI products have similar incentives: the more you use them, the more your work can teach models how to work without you.

You should own that knowledge.

Your preferences, standards, the decisions you’ve made, and the reasoning behind them are what make AI systems useful. They should not be trapped inside a product, or controlled by whichever company collected them.

You must be able to see them, audit them, correct them, control how they’re used, and take them with you. The best products and models for you may not exist yet, and locking your context into one company today means you can’t follow the next breakthrough when it arrives.

Opening our waitlist

Today, we’re opening the waitlist for Bonsai.

One place to work with AI that learns who you are and gets better the more you use it. It works with any model and the tools you already use, and lets you build custom apps that run inside it.

Everything it learns about you is stored in files on your machine. You can read them, edit them, and take them with you. And anything you build can be shared, so others can benefit from the skills and apps you create along the way.

We started Yaklabs to help more people use AI to do work they recognize as theirs. We’re betting on people to shape a future that cares more about what we can do with AI than what AI can do without us.

If you want to help shape Bonsai through your own work, we'd love to have you as a beta user. If you want to help us build it, we're hiring.