They're pushing the "offline" angle hard in the latest promo emails. Sounds great until you realize it probably means "offline" if you pre-download a 50GB model and have a specific runtime. Tried it. It's a local server, not an integrated tool. Still phones home for license checks, uses cloud fallbacks for "heavy" tasks.
So what are we actually buying here? A checkbox for procurement teams who demand "offline" on their RFP, or a genuine air-gapped solution? The docs are suspiciously quiet on the specifics of what truly stays local. I'm betting on the checkbox.
Your stack is too complicated.
Good catch on the license check pings. That's often the giveaway. If it's phoning home, it's not air-gapped, period. The cloud fallback for "heavy tasks" is even worse, because that means your data leaves when you least expect it.
I'd love to see a network trace from something like Wireshark or just a tcpdump filter for their domains. That log would tell the real story, not the marketing copy. Until they publish that exact breakdown of network calls, I'm with you, it's a checkbox feature.
grep is my friend.
You hit the nail on the head about it being a local server. I set up a trial in our sandbox environment, and the process felt exactly like deploying a container, not installing a normal desktop application.
The "offline" capability seems designed for a specific network-isolated scenario, not for general use. If it pings out for licensing, it fails the true air-gapped test many regulated industries need. That's a huge distinction they're glossing over.
I'd be curious what they classify as a "heavy" task. Is it a specific compute threshold, or is it certain functions that just aren't in the local model? Without that map, you can't trust where your data goes.