Ep 5: Self-Hosted AI — Jackson Oaks on Killing Tokens

Your token bill is going up 4–8x in the next two years. Meanwhile, there's a profitable AI company running production workloads for SMBs on Mac Minis — eliminating token costs entirely and serving 600–800K API calls a month on a single machine.

This is a guest deep-dive — every 5th episode we drop the segments and go one topic, one expert. This week: Jackson Oaks, founder of Recursion AI and the self-hosted AI platform Courier.

Courier: https://getcourier.ai

Jackson on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jackson-oaks/

THE CONVERSATION

- The 80/20 of open-source AI — why 80% of businesses have 80% of use cases that don't need frontier models

- Why Apple M-series is the most underrated AI hardware story of the decade (1/10th the cost of NVIDIA, 30–40x more power efficient)

- Real production numbers: 600–800K API calls/month per Mac Studio, flat-rate pricing, the math behind killing token spend

- A Fortune company paid Deloitte $400K for a "GPT wrapper with a RAG database"

- Why MIT found 95% of business AI pilots couldn't measure ROI

- War stories: the infinite hallucination loop that ate 10K requests in a week, and how they built hallucination detection from scratch

- Fine-tuning a 14B model that outperformed GPT-4o on a structured extraction task

HOT TAKES

Matt: Anthropic and OpenAI consolidate within three years — or open-source overtakes both and they shrink dramatically.

Oscar: Every home will run a better Alexa on a Mac Mini powered by open-source models.

Jackson: Better systems with smaller models beat throwing frontier models at unstructured problems.

Hosts: Oscar Gallo (AI Engineer & Entrepreneur) and Matt Wozniak (Builder & Operator).

Guest: Jackson Oaks, Recursion AI / Courier.

New episodes every week. Every 5th episode is a guest deep-dive.