Ghost came out of stealth on 5 October 2026 with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Founder Zain Javaid's machine uses an NVIDIA RTX PRO 4000 Blackwell SFF Edition GPU with 24 GB of GDDR7 ECC memory, an AMD Ryzen 5 7600 processor, 64 GB of DDR5 memory, and a 1 TB NVMe SSD. It has no screen, and owners talk to Core through a laptop, the mobile app, or iMessage. The first batch has already sold out. One caveat: Ghost's support page says Core still needs an internet connection for web search, email and software updates. The pitch is to sell ready-made local AI to people who would rather not set it up themselves. One review argued that anyone already comfortable with Ollama can replicate it for $1,500 less. Critics also questioned the price, the limited GPU memory, and how useful it is in practice. For founders, Ghost is a test of whether privacy and owning the device can justify a premium hardware price at a time when most assistants run in the cloud. Its sold-out first batch and a16z backing suggest there is demand, but on-device models with 24 GB of memory still trail frontier cloud models on difficult tasks.