ASAI Arc arrives, and ASAI comes to your phone

Two things this August. ASAI Arc — a premium tier for the questions Mini has to rush — and ASAI itself arriving on iOS and Android, so the same chats follow you off the desk.

What Arc is for

Most questions do not need a bigger model. They need a fast one, and that is what Mini is: quick, cheap enough to use without thinking about it, and good at the everyday. Arc exists for the other kind — a long contract, a whole codebase, a research thread that has been running for an hour and must not lose its own beginning.

The difference is room. Arc holds roughly four times as much before it has to start forgetting, and it reserves a larger budget for the answer itself, so long replies do not get clipped halfway through a thought. Nothing about the interface changes: you pick the tier in the model switcher, and the chat carries on.

Images are read by Arc — for everyone

This one is worth being explicit about, because it would be easy to quietly sell it as a premium feature. As of the end of July there is no separate vision model in ASAI: every request carrying an image is handled by Arc, whatever tier you are on. Send a screenshot, a scanned page, a photo of a whiteboard — the strongest model we run reads it, and it is not gated behind the paid tier.

ASAI on your phone

The mobile app is the same ASAI, wrapped natively. Not a trimmed-down companion with half the features — the identical chat, the same history, the same model switcher, on a phone.

• Push notifications — an answer that took a while can reach you after you have locked the phone.

• Native feel — haptics on send, proper status-bar and splash handling, no browser chrome in the way.

• One account — start a chat on the desktop, finish it on the bus; there is no separate mobile history.

It ships for iOS and Android under com.aperturesyndicate.asai. Until it lands in the stores, ASAI runs in any browser at asai.aperturesyndicate.com.

Which one should you use

Default to Mini. It answers faster and handles the large majority of what people actually ask. Reach for Arc when the input is long, when the reasoning has to hold many pieces at once, or when a conversation has grown past the point where Mini can keep all of it in view.

Same chat, same account, same history — the only decision left is how much room the question needs.