About Conway AI
Conway AI is one person, one iMac, and a model that learns in the open.
conw.ai is pronounced “Conway”. It is an independent, self-learning, low-energy AI assistant built and run by Thomas Conway — not a lab, not a venture-backed startup, and not a wrapper around somebody else’s model.
You teach it in plain sentences; it remembers instantly and shows you which memory each reply used. What many people independently teach is verified in public before it can help everyone. And the whole thing serves from a single 16GB iMac in a living room.
- Name
- conw.ai — pronounced “Conway”. Also written Conway AI or Conw.
- Builder
- Thomas Conway, founder and sole engineer
- What it is
- An independent self-learning AI assistant, free to use
- Current model
- Conway-Retrain 12B on a Gemma 4 base, served via MLX
- Where it runs
- One 16GB iMac; Conway Entity runs on your own hardware
- Contact
- [email protected] · @conwdotai on X · status.conw.ai
01.
The name
Say the domain out loud and you have the name.
conw.ai → Conway. That is the entire etymology. The product is named after the person who builds it, and the domain happens to spell it. You will see the same name on everything that ships from here:
- Conway-Omega — the original 188M-parameter checkpoint. Deprecated in-product, still open-source on Hugging Face.
- Conway-Retrain 12B — the current model, retrained on top of a Gemma 4 base and served through MLX on our own machine.
- Conway Entity — the fully local version that lives on your own hardware and learns you, with nothing leaving the machine.
- Conway Platform API — an OpenAI-compatible endpoint so you can build on the model from your own code.
Which Conway?
Not the mathematician, not the Game of Life, not the singer, and not a town. If you searched “Conway” looking for an AI that learns from you and shows its working, this is the one.
02.
The builder
Built by Thomas Conway, and only Thomas Conway.
conw.ai is a solo, independent build. The model retraining, the MLX serving stack, the memory system, the verification gate, the public ledger, the website and the emails from [email protected] are all one person. There is no marketing team, which is why the copy on this site says “we do not know” where a bigger company would have invented a number.
That constraint shapes the product. A single 16GB iMac is not a data centre, so efficiency is not a slogan here — it is the only way the thing runs at all. That is where the eco AI principles come from. And with one pair of hands, the only sustainable way to make the model better is to let the people using it teach it — carefully, visibly, with a gate. That is where the self-learning loop comes from.
03.
What it stands for
Three things we can say with a straight face.
It learns from the people who use it
Teach it a preference, a fact or a word and it is written to your private memory immediately — the next reply that uses it shows you exactly which memory, with a one-tap Forget. A taught word can go further, but only after several independent people teach the same thing days apart, it is reworded so it is nobody’s literal sentence, and it survives a quiz. Every rejection is public at conw.ai/learning.
Our serving stack. Our hardware. A replaceable checkpoint.
Inference is served by Conw, not forwarded to another model API. The checkpoint sits behind an interface so memory, safety rules and user ownership survive future model changes. Conw is a workshop, not a monument.
Efficiency we can measure, not invent
One 16GB machine instead of a GPU cluster. Response budgets that stop needless token generation. Background learning that defers when inference is busy. And no carbon number until we can meter it properly.
04.
Free, and how
No ads. No selling data. One small machine.
The compact local serving setup keeps costs low enough that the Free plan can include the full model and instant private memory with no credit card. Pro and Max raise your weekly allowance and help pay for serving and the guarded learning loop. Every tier gets the same answers.
Conversations are stored so eligible parts can enter the learning process. There are no ads and your data is not sold. If you want your account and chats removed, you can delete them anytime — see the privacy policy.
What is Conway AI?
Conway AI is the spoken name of conw.ai: an independent, self-learning AI assistant that learns from the people who use it, shows exactly what it learned, and runs its own model from a single 16GB iMac. It is free to use, with Pro and Max plans for heavier use.
Why is it called Conway?
Because it is built by Thomas Conway, and “conw.ai” read aloud is “Conway”. The domain is the name. Model releases carry it too: Conway-Omega, Conway-Retrain and Conway Entity.
Is Conway AI related to Conway’s Game of Life or John Conway?
No. Conway AI is unrelated to the mathematician John Horton Conway, his Game of Life cellular automaton, Conway Twitty, or any town called Conway. It is named after its builder, Thomas Conway.
Who is Thomas Conway?
Thomas Conway is the founder and sole engineer behind conw.ai. He builds and runs the model, the serving stack, the learning loop and the website himself — a solo, independent project rather than a lab or a venture-backed startup.
Is conw.ai a wrapper around another company’s model?
No. Conway-Retrain 12B is our current model, retrained on top of a Gemma 4 base and served ourselves through MLX. Your question is not forwarded to an external answer API. The earlier 188M Conway-Omega checkpoint is deprecated in-product but remains open-source on Hugging Face.
How do I contact Conway AI?
Email [email protected] — a human writes back. You can also find conw.ai on X at @conwdotai, and follow live service health at status.conw.ai.
Keep reading
Meet Conway AI today.
Free to use, no credit card. Teach it one useful thing and watch it come back in the next reply.