Our Philosophy

Computing at the Edge

We believe the most important shift in AI over the coming years won't happen in data centers — it will happen on the devices you already own.

The prevailing narrative frames AI as a race to build the largest cloud infrastructure. But for creative tools like Rings, this gets the picture backwards. The hardware sitting on your desk — Apple Silicon with its Neural Engine, unified memory, and energy-efficient architecture — is already a powerful inference machine. The capital expenditure already happened when you bought your Mac.

On-device processing eliminates per-token cloud costs, removes network latency, and keeps your creative work entirely under your control. There are no ongoing subscriptions funding someone else's GPU cluster. There is no upload step where your samples leave your machine. The computation happens where the data lives — on your hardware, at the edge.

Why This Matters for Creative Tools

Cloud-dependent AI tools introduce friction that works against the creative process. Every generation requires a round trip to a remote server. Every session depends on an internet connection. Every month brings another subscription payment. And your work — the samples, the patterns, the arrangements — passes through infrastructure you don't control.

Rings takes the opposite approach. Analysis, generation, and arrangement all run locally. Your sample library stays on your Mac. The models run on your Neural Engine. This isn't a compromise — it's a structural advantage. Research suggests that the majority of practical AI tasks can be handled by models small enough to run on-device, and the gap continues to narrow as hardware improves with each generation.

Further Reading

For a deeper look at why edge computing is poised to reshape the AI landscape, we recommend this analysis of Apple's approach to AI infrastructure:

External Article
Apple's AI Game Is Misunderstood
Dave Friedman explores why Apple's bet on on-device inference — leveraging billions of pre-deployed devices as inference hardware — represents a fundamentally different and potentially winning strategy compared to cloud-first competitors.
davefriedman.substack.com

What's Next

This page will grow as we articulate more of the principles behind Rings. Our goal is to build creative tools that respect your ownership of the hardware you've invested in, your privacy, and your creative process — without locking you into recurring costs for capabilities your Mac can already provide.