About Black Sheep Group
Why we build
Black Sheep Group is an independent technology lab. We build software, AI systems, and experimental products for problems worth solving, and every one of them goes through the same loop: dream, test, learn.
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Dream
Every project starts as a what-if. What if the whole house were one assistant instead of a separate speaker in every room? What if a SQL client didn't have to be installed on every machine? What if the commentary sat right next to the text?
Most software decisions are made once and then copied for years. Dreaming, for us, means not accepting "that's just how it works" as the answer.
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Test
A what-if is only a guess until it meets reality. So we build it and measure it. Kenzy's question about whether consumer GPUs could answer as fast as cloud assistants was settled with 500-request benchmarks, not a hunch.
Testing also means real people. Zubifi is an invite-only pilot so it can be tried properly before it opens up. QueryCommander is labeled beta because it is one.
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Learn
Results have to go somewhere. When Kenzy's wake-word experiment showed that loudness can't tell which room's speaker is nearest at normal distances, the conclusion wasn't better audio math. It pointed somewhere else entirely: presence sensing.
We keep what works, drop what doesn't, and write down why, including the results that didn't go our way. What we learn goes into the next version, or the next project, and the loop starts again.
Repeat
The common thread
A whole-home voice assistant, a market research workspace, a Bible study app, and a browser SQL client have almost nothing in common as markets. That's deliberate.
What they share is the loop. The audience changes from project to project. Dream, test, learn doesn't.
In practice
- Local when it matters
- If privacy or latency calls for running on your own hardware, we build for that. If the cloud genuinely helps, we use it. Neither is a religion.
- Labels mean what they say
- An alpha is an alpha. A pilot is invite-only. We'd rather undersell a project than describe it as more finished than it is.
- Projects stand on their own
- Each project gets its own name, domain, and identity, because each one serves different people. BSGROUP is the workshop, not the storefront.
- Open where we can
- Kenzy and QueryCommander are MIT-licensed on GitHub. Others are closed source for now, and we say so on their pages.
The name
The black sheep is the one that wanders off to see what's over the hill. Sometimes there's nothing there. Sometimes there is. Either way, it comes back knowing more than when it left.