Dear @reeflings, @TamaraFoubert and I – under the vigilant eye of @yudhanjaya , supervising us from Sri Lanka – embarked in an experiment that could hopefully give The Reef some AI capabilities in line with our EU-first, opensource, dependence-reducing, environmentally conscious approach to computation. Inspired by permacomputing and concerned about the large environmental and social impact of data centers powering AI, I turned to @hugi , who suggested locally run AI, and to Yudha, who suggested a “junkyard science” approach to Hugi’s idea.
So, under Yudha’s guidance, I purchased about 1,000 EUR of materials to build a computer – a steal given current prices of the kind of RAM that, being good at matrix multiplication, is good at the inference that AI is based on. The jewels of the crown are the two (second-hand) AMT Radeon VII GPUs, that do the computational heavy lifting. Tamara took care of assembling those pieces into a functioning machine. Yudha provided the software that handles the models (mostly fairly small Chinese open weight models), the interface and the harness with the permissions etc.
We are calling it Dikkenek, and once we get around to creating our own agent I plan to give it a Dikkenek-like personality, which I think is appropriate for a brusselaar AI. The idea is to make it accessible over the internet, so it will be our own little data center, fully powered with renewable electricity. In perfect Dikkenek style, we are already bragging about the machine, though it has not actually done anything useful yet: an inspired move by @Lee resulted in De Standaard briefly interviewing us for a forthcoming article about “Belgian organizations refusing to use American AI”. Not sure she will use our example though.
Testing is ongoing. Among the tests, I plan to use it the next time we need to produce documents to exchange with our various architects, engineers, notaries, etc. Of course, all of these are always reviewed by humans, but occasionally we use AI to produce a first draft. Tamara and I will keep you posted. Hey, if everything fails I will have a powerful gaming machine.
Huge, huge thanks to all who advised, inspired, and sweated on this project. I am counting on you to hang in there, there is still much to explore.
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