AI startup Weeklei said on Sunday it launched Owllo, a PC-installed personalised AI platform, in South Korea and the United States.

Owllo is an on-device AI platform that runs only within a user’s PC. It adopts a local large language model approach in which the AI installed on the PC operates directly without connecting to cloud servers. It processes web monitoring, image generation, file organisation, document summarisation and work automation through natural-language commands.

The technical core is Weeklei’s in-house hybrid AI. Unlike general-purpose cloud AI such as ChatGPT, a small, lightweight base model called an orchestrator analyses a user’s request and decides which specialised model to hand it to. It calls up a medical-focused model for medical questions and a legal-focused model for legal questions. It bypasses performance limits through collaboration among small specialised models instead of a single large model.

It also plans to support a fallback function that opens a browser to access ChatGPT directly when issues are difficult to solve locally. In that case, no additional charges occur because it does not go through an API.

Weeklei said the fully local method means sensitive information such as personal photos, chat content and passwords is not sent to external servers. Users can start using it immediately by downloading the installation file, and can use it 24 hours a day through encrypted remote access via messenger and the web even while out, if the PC is left on.

Weeklei also provides Owllet, an open AI platform where anyone can upload and download AI models and skills. It allows users to share and distribute specialised models, such as a child-safe AI, an English proofreading-only AI and a fantasy-novel-only AI, in an app store format.

With the separately provided training tool Owllo Teacher, users can drag and drop documents, conversation records and PDFs to create personalised AI models without coding knowledge. Training takes place only inside the PC so data does not leak outside.

Weeklei CEO Suji Kim (김수지) said, "We will push beyond the limits of intelligence through collaboration among lightweight models with different roles, and build a personal AI assistant that even our parents’ generation can use without worrying about personal information."