FUTO Swipe open-sources the thing that has quietly kept people on Google's keyboard: a tiny three-model system (635K, 300K, and 1.5M parameters) that does gesture typing entirely on your phone in milliseconds, shipped with the model weights and a C++ beam search library so anyone can add swipe typing to a VR headset, a laptop, or a Linux phone. It's from FUTO, the org Eron Wolf funds out of his own pocket to build open replacements for Big Tech features, with no investors attached.
🔥 Our Take: Most people don't realize swipe typing is genuinely hard, and for a decade only Google and Microsoft pulled it off. That's a big reason nobody actually leaves Gboard, even people who swear they care about privacy. FUTO just gave it away as open models that run on your phone. They can do that and nobody else will because of Eron Wolf, an ex-Yahoo guy who self-funds open versions of Big Tech stuff (a keyboard, GrayJay, a pile of it) with no investors asking why a keyboard earns zero. Will it move anyone off Gboard? Who knows, people stay out of habit. But if these little models are as good as Google's, the last real reason to stay is gone, and people building Linux phones or VR headsets finally get decent typing.