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- An innovative new AI bot runs on manual crank power
- It uses a Raspberry Pi and local AI models
- The bot is built to work offline without an extra power source
Making use of AI bots typically involves relying on cloud access and data centers, and giving up your information (and your chats) to one of the big tech companies. However, a new DIY gadget called CrankGPT works very differently.
Built by the enterprising folks at Squeez Labs, the CrankGPT box (via Boing Boing) is powered by a hand crank. It runs on a Raspberry Pi with 8GB of RAM, and uses small, local AI models from Meta and Google to transcribe speech and run queries.
As the demo video shows, if you find yourself in a post-apocalyptic world without electricity and internet connectivity, you can still get facts about hummingbirds and translate between languages through the power of your arm muscles.
"Provided the electronics are kept dry and at a reasonable temperature, there's no reason this thing won’t still work in a hundred years, though you’ll definitely need a fresh SD card," explain the inventors in their rundown of how CrankGPT was made.
Several plans available
The makers of this clever box have even made a tongue-in-cheek landing page offering the CrankGPT for sale. If your AI needs are more demanding then you can upgrade to a system based on an exercise bike, or an entire gym of people pedaling.
There's a more serious point here too though: Squeeze Labs is working on making AI smaller, cheaper, and faster so it can be run on more devices with no cloud connectivity required. That's better for user privacy and for the environment.
AI companies are investing huge amounts in data center expansion in an attempt to keep up with the growing compute needs of coders and other users, and that means increasing demands on electricity supply and water usage.
As Apple recently demonstrated with Siri AI, the most advanced and complex AI prompts need to be run on online servers. As models become more efficient over time and devices become more powerful, that should start to change.
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