A few months ago I had to fire everyone at my startup. I’m proud of what we accomplished, but after four years and $12m in investment we couldn’t find the revenue or growth we needed to continue, and my cofounder was nabbed by OpenAI. We couldn’t find a compelling route for an acquisition either, so we had to go into liquidation with little recovery for the investors.

This hurts, a lot. I had a team relying on me, and VCs I respected, and I wasn’t able to solve enough problems fast enough to get where we needed to. I’ll be writing a longer post mortem in the future, but first I want to focus on the open source side of our work. I was able to personally purchase the IP, data, and code for the Moonshine Voice framework from liquidation. With over 11,000 GitHub stars and growing it’s clearly meeting a lot of people’s needs, even if I failed to find a way to turn that usage into the magnitude of revenue we needed. Without the constraints that come with venture funding, it’s got a sustainable future, since the customers we do have more than cover the costs of maintaining and updating the models and code. I’m looking forward to helping it grow organically for years to come.

I don’t know exactly what comes next for me, but I’m still convinced running AI locally, on the edge, is the future. To decompress I finally took the chance to play through Kingdom Come II: Deliverance, and it lived up to all the praise, Warhorse have built an amazing game. Even that experience led me back to local AI though, because I wanted to explore their world more deeply, and so I built the Talk to Anyone mod. This open source project uses Moonshine and Qwen3 to give thousands of previously-nameless NPCs histories, relationships, and the ability to hold and remember conversations with the player.

I’m hopeful that games will be early adopters of local AI, because it costs too much to call cloud APIs from products that don’t make recurring revenue. The status quo seems to be very limited and fragmented support for speech to text, and no modern LLMs in mainstream games. I think unlimited, free AI access opens up a lot of creative possibilities, and I built this experiment to show some of what I’d be excited to see in the future.