What we mean by 'personal' AI
The phrase gets used loosely. Here's the specific bar we hold ourselves to: your data, your retrieval, your provider, your choice to walk away.
By BrainTube Team · · 5 min read
'Personal AI' has come to mean almost nothing. We use it for something specific: a system where you own the corpus, choose the model, can swap the provider, and can export everything in an afternoon. If any of those four is missing, the AI isn't personal — you're renting it.
You own the corpus
Your highlights, notes, brains and digests are yours. We store them, we don't train on them, and the export endpoint returns them in plain JSON whenever you want. Deleting your account deletes the corpus. There is no shadow copy we keep 'for analytics'.
You choose the model
Free tier runs on our keys with sensible defaults. Paid tier lets you bring your own — Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, local Ollama. The retrieval layer is the same; what changes is whose model writes the final answer. Your call.
You can swap providers
Because the corpus lives on your side of the wall and the retrieval interface is MCP, swapping out the answer-writing model is a one-click change. You're never stuck with our defaults if a better model ships next month.
You can walk away
We publish a one-page data pledge: what we store, how long, who can read it, and the exact export format. Walking away takes one click and one download. We'd rather lose users we can't keep happy than trap them.
Takeaways
- Personal AI = own corpus + choose model + swap provider + clean exit.
- Anything less is rental, regardless of the marketing.
- Our data pledge is one page on purpose.
Try BrainTube on your own corpus
Free tier, no card. Export anytime.
More to read
- Second Brain vs AI Memory Layer: What Actually Changed — A second brain system organises what you write. An AI memory layer makes what you consume queryable by any model. The difference decides which one you should actually build.
- Stop watching videos. Start querying them. — The 60-minute video you bookmarked won't get watched. But the four answers buried in it will get used — if you can pull them on demand.
- How to build a second brain from your YouTube history — A practical workflow for turning years of passive watching into a knowledge graph you can actually use.