In 1999, I got my hands on something that would change my life. I removed the case from my personal computer and revealed the ports to install my brand new GeForce 256 GPU. Finally, I could play Unreal Tournament (my favorite video game)!
I spent countless hours fine-tuning and overclocking that GPU, excited by each incremental improvement. Cheap thrills! It was not only magical for me… but inspired the companies I would later build.
This first personal computer experience of mine came with a huge sense of freedom. I “broke away” from mainframes. I could sit comfortably in my own dorm room, with my computer, storing my documents, my programs, my games, and a secure gateway to connect with the world. A big upgrade from carrying floppy disks around campus to access mainframes.
1999 was also the year that NVIDIA coined the term "GPU." The whole thing was revolutionary—and we'd have little clue for nearly two decades about the real products and industries they would enable.
Looking back now, in 2025, that experience has continued to shape me. With hindsight, I see clear parallels between my work at Personal AI and those early computing days: what GPUs were to CPUs back then, Personal Language Models (PLMs) are to Large Language Models (LLMs) today. It's the same pattern of technological evolution, just playing out in a different era.
Also in 1999, another big event happened—not in hardware, but in the cloud. Salesforce emerged with their bold "No Software" campaign. They pushed something entirely new: moving workloads from the computer to the cloud for higher efficiency. The irony of their campaign was that Salesforce is one of the largest software companies—but the campaign wasn't about eliminating software, it was about evolving it.
Salesforce promised something better, faster, and cheaper.
In a sea of LLM-based applications, Personal AI is offering something smarter, safer, and more personal than conventional LLMs. We're laser-focused on what actually matters to users—real benefits they can see and feel, not just technical specs. Move aside, Agentforce!
Salesforce's "No Software" campaign showed us that challenging the status quo could transform an entire industry. When was the last time you downloaded a piece of software?
Our "No LLM" movement represents the same magnitude of disruption. Personal Language Models are a fundamentally different approach to AI. And likely, we don't even know 5% of the impact it will have. Perhaps in a few years, we’ll be asking each other, “when was the last time you uploaded to an LLM?”
Suman Kanuganti
CEO, Personal AI
