Rob,


> The unphone is awesome! Can it be a platform for open source AI?
>

Tnx! It came from teaching a course on IoT devices --
https://iot.unphone.net/ -- so the core is a tiny ESP32 microcontroller. It
can do sensing and manage control tasks and etc. -- and is great for off
grid messaging https://meshtastic.org/docs/hardware/devices/unPhone/ -- but
it won't run any version of the foundation models that are a key component
of the new AI. Although those models have now been dramatically reduced in
size to fit on consumer grade GPUs, they will likely always need multiple
GBs of VRAM and huge parallel matrix computation. So the AI engines will
for the foreseeable need a machine that currently costs upwards of €2.5k to
run end user tasks. The good news is they have broken out of the corporate
cloud and can be used to give back the technology to the people who created
the necessary preconditions for its existence: every author or artist or
scholar or teacher or pupil or... well, let's just shorten that to
"humanity"? :)


> I think we have a great analogy here. Bricolabs was started by the promise
> of open source hardware, fuelled by Adrian Bowyens REPRAP. We ‘produced’ an
> imaginary that kept a lot of us going in our minds as having - knowing
> there were similar intelligences around, in itself a great ‘result’. We
> did not aim for a movement.
> And now you are here telling us DIYAI is on us!
> To me, this is a similar moment.
> Let’s discuss how we can harness this in an imaginary *and a product,*
> based on the unphone. And a movement unsingularity :)
>

I remember REPRAP! How inspiring that was! I remember James showing me it
running at Access Space, which later provided the laser cutters that Paul
Beech used after winning the Raspberry Pi logo competition to make the
first case for that machine. Paul (and Jon Williamson) later founded a
successful maker company (Pimoroni) who now make the unPhone...

I don't really know where the next leap forward in this story of
tech-for-the-people is coming from, but the existence of communities like
yours gives me renewed hope that it is coming soon!

Have a good one,
Hamish