- An innovative new AI bot runs on a manual crank
- It uses a Raspberry Pi and local AI models
- The bot is built to work offline without an additional 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 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’re in a post-apocalyptic world with no electricity or internet connection, 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 why this thing won’t still work in a hundred years, although you’ll definitely need a new SD card,” the inventors explain in their walkthrough of how the CrankGPT was made.
Multiple plans available
The makers of this nifty box have even created a tongue-in-cheek landing page offering CrankGPT for sale. If your AI needs are more demanding, you can upgrade to a system based on an exercise bike or an entire gym with people pedaling.
However, there is also a more serious point here: Squeeze Labs is working to make AI smaller, cheaper and faster, so that it can be run on multiple devices without the need for a cloud connection. It is better for users’ privacy and for the environment.
AI companies are investing huge sums in data center expansion in an attempt to keep up with the growing computing needs of coders and other users, and that means increasing demands on electricity supply and water consumption.
As Apple recently demonstrated with Siri AI, the most advanced and complex AI prompts must 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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