AI is ruining everything, right? The economy, air quality, and computing as a whole have all felt the impact of the exponential growth in data centers for machine learning. However, there's one little hardware AI project that proves bigger isn't always better, and even shows a possible way out of the current memory crisis.
It's called CrankGPT by Squeez Labs (via Hackaday) and the gist of it is simple: Have a little microcomputer run a tiny local model for AI voice assistance, then stick it in a box and power the whole thing with a hand crank. No massive power station, no endless racks of GPUs, no DRAM-destroying demands.
The computer in question is powered by a standard 8 GB Raspberry Pi and pretty much nothing else. It handles the voice recognition node, the local LLM (large language model), and the text-to-speech stuff. CrankGPT's creators built their own edge voice agent to process the complete algorithm (i.e. voice input > LLM stage > text-to-vo...
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