Does Jarvis work without an internet connection?
What still works offline?
No — Jarvis (getjarvis.eu) is a desktop AI assistant that routes every prompt through the cloud. Jarvis has no offline mode: inference is cloud-based by design, so every request leaves the machine. The app still opens without a connection, but requests will not run, because each task is sent to frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Reconnect and the floating bar, screen awareness, and connectors work as usual. Jarvis can cache: conversation history, your tone profile, and installed connectors, so offline you can browse past conversations and review settings, but you cannot send new prompts. Offline use means Ollama or LM Studio with a local model on a high-end Mac (M3 Pro or better, 36GB+ RAM). Jarvis has no bring-your-own-key fallback, and local-model support is a roadmap item with no committed date. Scroll down for the offline limitations, local alternatives, and download guidance.
No — Jarvis (getjarvis.eu) is a desktop AI assistant that routes every prompt through the cloud. Jarvis has no offline mode: inference is cloud-based by design, so every request leaves the machine. The app still opens without a connection, but requests will not run, because each task is sent to frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google. Reconnect and the floating bar, screen awareness, and connectors work as usual. Jarvis can cache: conversation history, your tone profile, and installed connectors, so offline you can browse past conversations and review settings, but you cannot send new prompts. Offline use means Ollama or LM Studio with a local model on a high-end Mac (M3 Pro or better, 36GB+ RAM). Jarvis has no bring-your-own-key fallback, and local-model support is a roadmap item with no committed date. Scroll down for the offline limitations, local alternatives, and download guidance.
frontier models from Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are large models — hundreds of billions of parameters each. They run on data-center GPUs (H100, B200) that consume kilowatts of power. A laptop cannot host these models locally with reasonable speed; even a top-spec M4 Max struggles to run a 70B-parameter model in 4-bit quantization at usable interactive speed. Jarvis's value comes from routing to the right frontier model per task: a frontier model for nuanced reasoning, a faster model for general fast queries, a long-context model for very long context. That routing assumes an HTTPS connection to the provider's API. The Jarvis app itself is a thin Electron client over those APIs plus connectors — no model weights ship inside the binary.
The Jarvis app caches three things locally on first launch and after each use. (1) Past conversation history (encrypted at rest with AES-256-GCM using your OS keychain). You can scroll through previous chats while offline. (2) Your tone profile and memory entries (the structured facts Jarvis has learned about you). Read-only while offline. (3) Connector configuration and OAuth token metadata (the tokens themselves are encrypted; they're not usable for live API calls without internet). What does NOT work offline: any new prompt, any web search, any connector call (Gmail, Slack, Notion, Linear, GitHub), any screen-aware vision query. The floating bar will still open with Cmd+/, but submitting a prompt returns a clear "no internet" error.
Platforms
