The waiter you know
You start ordering. He stands there in silence, pen still, until you have said the very last word. Only then he turns around, walks to the kitchen, and tells them everything. You wait for the whole thing.
In plain words
Your computer can think while you type.
MAFDET is a free app that runs an AI assistant on your own computer, and makes it answer sooner by starting its work while you are still writing your question. This page explains why that matters, without a single technical word.
The idea
Two waiters.
◆ The good waiter
You say "the pasta" and he has already told the kitchen to start the water. By the time you finish with the drinks, half your order is cooking. You still get exactly what you asked for. You just get it sooner.
Every AI chat you have used is the first waiter: it does nothing until you press Enter. MAFDET is the second. It reads your question as you type it and starts thinking about it before you have finished.
What changes for you
Three things, and nothing else.
Answers sooner
In the tests, a question that took 12 seconds to get an answer took 3 with MAFDET. Same question, same answer, a quarter of the wait. On a bigger, slower assistant the wait went from almost two minutes to under one.
Nothing leaves your computer
The assistant lives on your disk, not on a company's server. No account, no subscription, no one reading your questions. Once installed, it even works with the Wi-Fi off.
It works on the PC you have
It was built on a gaming graphics card from 2019, not on a server. A recent Mac works too. If your computer plays games, it can probably run this.
Wait, what is "an AI on my computer"?
The same kind of assistant as the famous ones, living at your place.
The assistants you know run in a data centre far away: you type, your words travel there, the answer travels back. The program that does the thinking, the "model", is theirs.
A local assistant is the same idea with the model downloaded on your own computer, once, like a big file. After that your computer does the thinking itself. It is a little less brilliant than the biggest ones, and a lot more private.
The catch has always been the wait: your computer is slower than a data centre, so you type, you press Enter, and you sit there. MAFDET exists to take most of that wait away, by using the time you spend typing.
Is it hard to install?
Download, double-click, done.
You download a folder and double-click one file. MAFDET looks at your computer, installs what it needs, and picks the assistant that runs best on your machine. The first time takes a few minutes, mostly downloading; after that it opens in a second.
You get a normal chat window. The only difference you will notice is a small line under the box that says what the assistant is already doing while you type.
The honest part
What it is, and what it is not.
A prototype by two students
Made by two friends at the University of Catania, in the open. It works and it is measured, but it is young: things can break, and they say so.
It needs a decent computer
A graphics card with 6 GB of memory, or an Apple Silicon Mac. On an older laptop without one it still works, but slowly.
Free, and open source
It costs nothing and anyone can read exactly how it is made. That is also why you can trust the "nothing leaves your computer" part: it can be checked.