Mark

Co-founder & CEO @TryMapleAI | prev AI/ML at  @Apple and Engineering at @Canvas_by_Inst

[Mark @marksuman]

I spent 6 years at Apple working on cool AI and privacy tools. Then I saw that popular AI apps couldn't be used for anything sensitive. So I left and helped build an AI people can trust with their real life.

We've come a long way since our humble launch in Jan 2025.

[Maple @TryMapleAI]

You know that hesitation before you type something into AI that you might regret? We built Maple to make it disappear.

Today we're (re)introducing Maple, the Personal Intelligence Platform. Encrypted AI for your real life.

[Mark @marksuman]

@NatesMindOnline I hear you on the exports. We will add those to our list.

What about formatting tripped up for you?

[Mark @marksuman]

Grok knows...

[Grok @grok]

**Maple (TryMapleAI) is the clear standout** on the App Store for exactly what you're asking: anonymous accounts (no email), end-to-end encrypted chats, and Lightning payments for financial anonymity.

Most other "private AI" apps are either:
- Fully local/offline (PrivatAI, Private LLM, etc.) — zero signup, on-device only, no cloud power or recurring BTC payments.
- Or standard cloud apps that require email/Apple ID + IAP.

Haven't found another cloud-based ChatGPT-like app that combines true anon signup + pure Bitcoin/Lightning payments. New sovereign options usually surface first on Nostr/Bitcoin circles.

Maple seems purpose-built for this niche right now.

[Mark @marksuman]

@Libertas and it became a source of distraction in the classroom. Students and teachers I talk to dislike that it's too hard to resist playing games during class.

[Mark @marksuman]

Open weight models are right on the heels of closed, proprietary models.
- @ramez at @OsloFF

[TFTC @TFTC21]

Freedom AI 101 at the Oslo Freedom Forum.

@marksuman of @TryMapleAI on stage.

[Mark @marksuman]

“Be ready not only to oppose what is wrong but to build what is right.” @OsloFF https://t.co/PV9DqHQJyQ

[Mark @marksuman]

The built-in AI systems on centralized platforms are huge attack vectors. Um yeah lol

[International Cyber Digest @IntCyberDigest]

‼️🚨 BREAKING: Meta's AI feature let attackers hijack Instagram accounts for days with nothing but a username. It was being A/B tested on a slice of users, and if you were in the test, you couldn't turn it off. Among the casualties: the official Obama White House account.

The method: get on a VPN near the target's region, ask the Meta AI support agent to send a verification code to any email you control, relay that code back to the agent, and it hands over a password reset link. Without ID or human review. From there, the account is yours.

The flaw lived in the AI's logic layer, which acted on recovery requests with no real identity checks. One researcher compared it to the Roblox AI assistant exploit from days earlier, where you needed a target's billing info. Instagram was easier: the username and a regional VPN were enough and victims reported sessions revoked and passwords changed with no email, text, or push alert at all.

By the time it went public, the method was common knowledge in blackhat Telegram circles and had been used to allegedly hijack 100+ high-value accounts.

Accounts hit:
- obamawhitehouse (the archived official Obama White House account, ~2.4M followers. Hackers posted an AI-generated image captioned "The White House is under Shiites' control," plus cryptic anti-Trump and pro-Iranian Stories. Meta confirmed the hack and scrubbed it.
- Premium short handles like hey and jowo, worth over $1M combined, stolen and flipped on Telegram.
- albert (owned by Albert Renshaw), whose owner publicly reported being locked out and unable to reach Meta support.

Meta has since patched it. There was no public acknowledgment.

[Maple @TryMapleAI]

A single search is rarely enough. Maple Research now keeps going until it has the full picture. And we’ve made web search free for all users. Go ahead and research life’s most difficult questions.

Time to finally figure out how off-sides works in the World Cup. ⚽️

[Anthony Ronning @anthonyronning]

Everyone always latches onto posts like this and goes “see look, relying on ai code bad!”

I’m not going to claim my shit is fully clean, or that I’ve hit any runaway success metrics yet..

But maple is a team of 2 and I’ve legitimately not written a single line of code in over 18 months. We’re in a healthy growing position with an open model consumer AI app I’m proud to say both of my parents even use as their main AI.

I don’t let ai agents run unchecked. I steer heavily and throw away broken experiments. I haven’t automated away everything I possibly could. I only implement and allow in features I can conceptually hold in my head AND know will not be a net negative support / maintenance burden.

This is, at surface level, at the cost of many missing “common features” and yes I’m fully aware of most bugs and I intentionally live with them as non-deal breakers. I live with the bugs instead of spinning up agent after agent fixing them as they create more like wack a mole.

I value my work life balance and live in a place where I’m not spending any time working on critical bugs or support.

Everyone’s mileage may vary, each app / domain is going to be different, skill level is all over the place as we figure out what even is the skill we all need now. Each decision we make with AI has hidden costs.

But damn, am I not extremely happy and excited for this new era of never writing any code again.

And no, I won’t allow any future bug or downtime take away for the last 18 months of this new glorious era. Knock on wood, but we could go bust tomorrow due to some “mistake caused by ai” and I’d be proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish and how I’ve lived my life.

Because the 18 months of my company’s existence before AI didn’t result in any happy end goal anyways. It went completely bust, as most things do AI or not.

[Mark @marksuman]

Billions of devices with powerful GPUs. Get ready.

[The Information @theinformation]

Exclusive: At Apple’s annual developer conference next month, the star of the show will be a series of long-delayed artificial intelligence upgrades to the iPhone.

But the company is also expected to emphasize what could be an underrated asset in its efforts to catch up in AI: Its ability to run AI models on the billions of Apple devices in circulation.

Full story from @aatilley: https://t.co/or984D0RrP

[Mark @marksuman]

@1a1n1d1y we're a rust stack, too

[Mark @marksuman]

I spent 6 years at Apple working on cool AI and privacy tools. Then I saw that popular AI apps couldn't be used for anything sensitive. So I left and helped build an AI people can trust with their real life.

We've come a long way since our humble launch in Jan 2025.

[Maple @TryMapleAI]

You know that hesitation before you type something into AI that you might regret? We built Maple to make it disappear.

Today we're (re)introducing Maple, the Personal Intelligence Platform. Encrypted AI for your real life.

[Mark @marksuman]

@1a1n1d1y 🫡

[Mark @marksuman]

“Consumer AI is massively underbuilt.” We agree!

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

I just got back from SF and I FEEL INSPIRED.

I spent 5 days with frontier AI model teams, AI startup founders, and 3 billionaires.

My takeaways:

1. I had lunch with 3 billionaires. All of them are buying SaaS companies and rebuilding them agent-first. They were deeply inspired by Bending Spoons and Ryan Cohen's eBay deal. Buy the company, cut the headcount, rebuild the tech, add agents, add features, make more valuable experience, raise prices.

2. The frontier model companies are hungry for usage data from the field. They can see API calls and token counts. They can't see the actual workflows. If you're deep in a niche using these models in ways the model companies haven't seen, that understanding is incredibly valuable. Usage intelligence is the new alpha.

3. Consumer AI is massively underbuilt. Every billboard in SF is either B2B inference infrastructure or vertical agent companies. The entire city is optimized for enterprise. Meanwhile you have companies like Cal AI doing $50M ARR in 18 months as a consumer app. I met with a cool few teams doing consumer AI (@paulscherer / @ekuyda)

4. MCP came up in literally every conversation. The companies exposing their product as MCP endpoints are getting pulled into deals they never pitched for. The ones that aren't are becoming invisible to agents. This is the new SEO. If agents can't find you, you don't exist. Building products for agents is the new zeitgeist in general.

5. Not uncommon for hot seed rounds to be $25-50 million valuations. I saw a Series A at $450 million

6. If I had a dollar every time someone mentioned "forward-deployed engineer" this trip I could have funded a seed round. It's the hottest role in SF right now. The person who sits between the agent and the customer, making sure everything actually works.

7. The mood around open source shifted. A year ago it felt like open source was chasing the frontier models. Now founders are telling me Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of what they need at a fraction of the cost. The "which model do you use" conversation is being replaced by "which model for which task." Model loyalty kinda feels dead.

8. Voice agents came up more than I expected. Multiple founders told me voice is the interface for the next billion users. The billion people who will never type a prompt will absolutely talk to one.

9. The Obsidian community in SF is weirdly intense. Multiple founders showed me their vaults unprompted. Like showing someone your home gym. It's a flex now. The quality of your knowledge base (second brain?) is becoming a status symbol among builders.

10. Maybe it was just the people I met but the age of the founders is shifting. I met more founders over 40 this trip than any trip before and more founders under age 21 than ever before. Founders getting older and younger at the same time.

11. I spoke to a lot of fast-growing startups, VCs and frontier models who are hiring content creators right now.

12. The restaurant scene in SF is actually better than it's been in years. Founders are going out more. Alcohol is out, not surprisingly.

13. SF doesn't feel like the only place anymore. We all have access to the same frontier models. We all read the same X feed. A founder in NYC or Lagos is calling the same APIs as a founder in SoMa. So in the past it felt like SF was always lightyears ahead, doesn't feel that way anymore. It's okay not to live in SF and have BIG DREAMS.

14. The coworking spaces in SF are half empty but the coffee shops are packed. People want to be around people. I had a few startup ideas here....

15. Walking around the Mission I noticed something: the street-level businesses, the taquerias, the barbershops, the laundromats, none of them use any AI at all.

16. I heard the phrase "agent debt" for the first time. Like technical debt but for agents. When you hack together an agent workflow fast and never clean it up, the system prompts conflict, the memory gets polluted, the tools overlap. 6 months later the agent is doing weird things and nobody knows why lol.

17. Met a few people who carry two phones now. One for personal. One that's basically an agent terminal running Telegram or iMessage connections to their agent fleet.

It's always amazing to get that dose of inspiration in SF. I FEEL INSPIRED.

But I'm so happy to be back home, locked in and building.

We're 12-18 months into a shift that will take 15 years to play out. The urgency in every conversation was real.

What an incredible time to be building.

[Mark @marksuman]

Looking forward to this. It's just a block down Congress from @aifreedomlab_.

[Ben Lang @benln]

We're booking out a cafe on May 30th in Austin

Grab coffee, Cursor credits, meet the team, and build together

[Mark @marksuman]

@jarheadwho @OsloFF It's a great group of speakers and attendees. Can't wait!

[Mark @marksuman]

Excited to speak at the @OsloFF next week running a workshop called Freedom AI 101. Come learn AI tools that can be used in any environment. Even if you already use AI daily, still stop by. There will be something for everyone! https://t.co/FhYQpER7RX

[Mark @marksuman]

@aarmlovi Warmth of wood is better than cold metal and glass. And the artificial light breaks the natural charm.

[Mark @marksuman]

@ericmigi this would pair so well with @TryMapleAI privacy AI

[Mark @marksuman]

@ShawnTierney check out @TryMapleAI

[Mark @marksuman]

Any review window is too long. The only proper review is open source for the world to inspect together.

[The Information @theinformation]

Exclusive: The White House is preparing a voluntary AI model review plan that would let intelligence and cybersecurity agencies examine frontier models before release.

AI labs are pushing for a shorter review window than the proposed 90 days.

Full story: https://t.co/1NuqQtOep8