Self-Hosted AI with Jackson Oaks. Why 80% of AI Bills Are Wasted.
Every fifth episode of Human In the Loop is a guest deep-dive. This week: Jackson Oaks, founder of Recursion AI and the self-hosted AI platform Courier. Jackson has been running open-source models in production since early 2025, processing 600–800,000 API calls a month per Mac Studio for SMB customers — and turning a profit doing it.
His thesis: 80% of businesses have 80% of use cases where open-source local models beat frontier intelligence on cost, predictability, and data control. We get into the Apple M-series long bet, the Deloitte $400K GPT wrapper, the infinite hallucination loop that ate 10,000 requests, and why the next wave of AI businesses is $200/mo agents for plumbers — not "AI for everything."
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