Computing after the app.
Beacon is a desktop app for working through a question with AI. Instead of a wall of chat text, the answer comes back as cards on a board, such as tables, maps and charts with a source on every figure, and you can point at them, draw on them and correct them.
Everything in the app is real footage. What comes next is marked on screen.
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A board that argues back
Serious thinking has never happened in a chat window. It happens at a desk covered in papers, or at a whiteboard, with someone who argues back.
Sketch what matters, and it fills it in
Put the question on the board, draw a table by hand and write the columns you care about. Beacon reads the ink, looks the figures up and hands the table back filled in, with a source on every number, so nothing on the board is an unsourced guess.
It argues back
When the numbers don’t support what you assumed, it says so. Your budget assumes rents rise two percent a year, but around here they’ve risen six — and that is on the board, next to the figure it came from.
Strike it out with a pen
Draw a line through the option you’ve ruled out, the way you would on paper, and it’s gone. Point at a row and call it “this one”, or just say what you want changed.
One board, one conversation
Ask for one more thing and the board grows instead of starting over: a column on the table, the three homes on a map, a chart of how the rents moved. Nothing gets asked twice, and every exchange stays where you left it.
It walks you through it
Beacon reads its work aloud, and the camera moves to each card as it’s described and pulls back to the whole board at the end — the tour you see in the film is the app doing exactly that.
Decisions stay on watch
When you decide, Beacon keeps the decision, your reasons and everything you gathered, and it keeps watch on what they depend on. Telling you when that changes is the next thing we’re building.
Yours, from the start
By the time you decide, it holds your decision, your reasons and everything you gathered. That isn’t chat history, so it should live somewhere you own.
Your data, on your machine
Your workspace, your decisions and your reasons live on your own device, and any keys you add are encrypted in its keychain. The built-in language model runs in the cloud, in Europe; bring your own keys and you choose the provider.
A box you own
Next comes a small machine of your own that holds the memory and does the work, so what you’ve decided never has to live on someone else’s server. For a law firm that isn’t a feature, it’s the only way they’re allowed to buy.
Every screen is just glass
Start a decision on your laptop, sketch a change on a tablet on the train, and see what it worked on overnight on a screen in the kitchen. The screens are glass, while the intelligence and the memory stay with you.
None of this is a slide
What you can download and use today, said plainly.
On Mac and Windows, today
Beacon runs on macOS 12+ and Windows 10+. It’s an experimental build of an active research project, so expect rough edges, and it’s free: bring your own keys from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google Gemini or DeepSeek and every feature works.
Nothing to configure
The Standard plan brings the models, the tools and the voice, so you bring only the question. It isn’t open yet, and until it is, early testers get what it includes for free.
The surface is open
Under the board is a full AI harness, with agents, tools and memory, and it’s open: plug in any tool that speaks MCP, and bring your own agents, or export them to share. A screen of your own, built for Beacon, is next.
An experiment, on purpose
The name is literal. Beacon is research into the hardest part of computing after the app — not the agent, but the interface.
The open question
Take away apps, windows and icons and nobody yet knows what the screen should show instead, or how a person is meant to steer it. Every decision in Beacon — what earns space, how a workspace arrives, how you correct it mid-thought — is a position on that question, tested by people using it for real work.
You are part of it
Using Beacon is how the answer gets found. What works stays, what does not gets cut, and the reasoning is published as we go in the field notes.
Test it before it is finished
Beacon is an experiment, and it needs people to run it against real work. Tell us who you are and we will send an invitation when the next build is ready for you.