The problem
"Big-tech answers 0.01% of the most pressing questions of our lives. It's up to us to answer the rest." POSTER
The questions worth answering, per the poster: "What value can I offer to someone else?" and "Where is my attention actually going?" The tools that promise this keep coming — "second brains and personal assistants. Nothing has stuck." POSTER · DECK
Second brains
Manual vaults — Notion, Obsidian, PKM. High learning curve, hard to maintain. DECK
Personal assistants
One use, then forgotten — more novel than useful; they need systems-design expertise. DECK
Sharing by hand
Copy-paste updates, group chats, FYI emails — manual burnout. DECK
What is it
"Your Personal AI Node — share your life, confidentially." POSTER
A node that ingests your own data, builds intelligence over it automatically, and shares it on your terms: you connect sources, give people keys, and trust they receive only what they need — a Cognitive Firewall sits between every question and your data. The deck's framing: "Most AI amplifies your output to the system. TOPOS makes the system amplify you." The live site's: "Private by default. Open-source engine. No lock-in." POSTER · DECK WEB
What it does
The poster's five key features, with the deck's shipped detail.
Connect any source
Common connectors out of the box; build your own through their Sheaf app or with your AI. POSTER · DECK
Personal intelligence
An automated knowledge graph — people, places, goals — plus ask-anything chat over your own data. POSTER · DECK
Routines
Scheduled agents that spend tokens for you: pull Gmail, Drive, GitHub; write status updates; send to everyone holding a key. POSTER
Cognitive Firewall
Four walls between a question and your data — minimum disclosure, and it negotiates for clearer requests. POSTER
Permissioned sharing
Keyed access and grants with one-click revoke; views over timeline, calendar, and topics. MCP lets Claude and ChatGPT connect to your node. POSTER · DECK
How it works
Your data in, scoped answers out — two token lanes: routines at 80%, the firewall at 20%.
Sources in
The 60-second demo loop: "connect a source → TOPOS builds intelligence → grant a scoped key → the firewall answers without exposing the data → a routine repeats it." POSTER
Built with: Python · local AI via Ollama · Hugging Face · Keycloak · GCP. Their stated posture: "Prove value with people first — then upgrade the privacy architecture." POSTER
The numbers
The team's own evals — the poster's firewall release grades and the deck's retrieval scores.
Who's building it
A founder-engineer at Dialogues, with a COO named on the deck. POSTER · DECK
Jonny Johnson
Deck bio: LLM systems since 2016 · AI ethics & governance. "Built the MVP that carried a Series B company to its next round"; built for an a16z-backed startup and for a team that got into Meta's first AI cohort.
Mitch Richburg
Deck bio: mechanical engineer, concept-to-production product leadership; previously Head Mechanical Engineer at Guinn Partners — "100+ product prototypes over 5 years"; drone and robotic systems, concept through production.
Traction
A live private beta — the poster's status line, and the site is up. POSTER WEB
From the beta
"I forget the node is even running — every morning it emails me about yesterday's work." POSTER
From the beta
"I saw a request about my life and tensed — I knew there was stuff I didn't want shared. Then I reviewed the response: the Cognitive Firewall sanitized it and said what happened in a positive way." POSTER
From the beta
"I want to create a Topos node for my house — collecting its telemetry data, and then having a conversation with it!" POSTER
Build velocity
"1 person. 10 shipped systems in 6 months" — control plane, node engine, react app, auth server, app sheaf, links app, eval framework, website, docs site, deploy pipeline. DECK Pending approval
Roadmap
Live beta shipped; next: fully self-serve onboarding, a production control plane (K8s), and 20 automated everyday routines. POSTER
In their own words
From the cohort's mock demo day, 2026-07-17 — Jonny presenting Topos.
"Build what the internet was supposed to be." The epigraph of the team's cohort poster POSTER
"It's going to be very similar to a knowledge base — a way to collect personal data for yourself, something like Obsidian or Notion. Those tools require that you spend a lot of time collecting your own notes and thoughts and linking things together. This is meant to do it automatically."
"There's a Python package you can download, and you start it with topos node in the CLI. When it's linked up there's a UI you can access via a web app. It's all hosted locally."
"Where this ends up going beyond your typical personal database: all of this context is then available to be shared with other people who might want access to it."
"Your information is private. The structure of the thing is open source — how it is derived is open source."
Try it & links
"Ask me for a live demo." POSTER
| Surface | Where | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Product | topos.dialogues.ai — "Your Personal AI Node" · login "enter TOPOS →" | WEB Live · 07-22 |
| Pricing | topos.dialogues.ai/pricing — hosted free tier at $0/mo; Basic at $9.99/mo; prepaid wallet, "no surprise bills" | WEB Live · 07-22 |
| Company | dialogues.ai — the Dialogues app family: Topos, Sheaf, Chat Arena, Browser History plugin, Grow, VoxTerm | WEB Live · 07-22 |
| GitHub | The site links github.com/dialoguesai/topos — that repo 404s (checked 07-22). The dialoguesai org is public with two satellite repos (browser-history-plugin, VoxTerm); an older draftin1/topos-cli exists | WEB Conflict — confirm |
| Community | Discord · x.com/dialoguesai — both linked from the site | WEB |
| Telegram | t.me/draftin1 | POSTER |
| Contact | jonny@dialogues.ai | POSTER Confirm preferred |
Provenance ledger
Every load-bearing claim and where it comes from; decisions live in §11.
| Claim | Comes from | Tier | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| One-liner, problem framing, features, token lanes, firewall walls, roadmap | Cohort poster, July 2026 | POSTER | Team's own artifact |
| Founder (Jonny Johnson, Dialogues) and contact | Poster team block; cohort registry person record corroborates name, org, handles | POSTER REGISTRY | Corroborated |
| Mitch Richburg, COO, and both deck bios | Deck team slide only — he appears in no cohort record | DECK | Pending approval |
| Firewall release evals (0 · 0 · 4×) | Poster "The proof" panel — the team's own eval run | POSTER | Pending approval |
| Retrieval 0.497 → 0.954, abstain 1.00, ship-gate | Deck measurement slide — the team's own harness | DECK | Pending approval |
| Live product, pricing, Dialogues app family | topos.dialogues.ai, /pricing, and dialogues.ai — fetched 2026-07-22 | WEB | Verified live |
| "Open-source engine" and the GitHub link | Site claim + site's own link; dialoguesai/topos 404s via api.github.com, 2026-07-22 — only two satellite repos are public | WEB | Conflict — confirm |
| Build velocity (10 systems / 6 months; July commit counts) | Deck velocity slide — private-profile figures, not publicly checkable | DECK | Pending approval |
| Beta-user quotes (§07) | Poster "From the beta" panel, as printed by the team | POSTER | Team's own artifact |
| Registry footprint | No Topos row in team_profiles.csv; Jonny filed under WikiGen (visiting scholar), mock-pitch record 2026-07-17; the cohort repo has no topos.md (404, 07-22) | REGISTRY | Thin — noted |
| Pitch excerpts (§08) | Mock demo day, 2026-07-17; lightly punctuated from a live transcript | PITCH | Pending approval |
Founder review
Five things before this page goes public.