Welcome back, future AI historians! It's been a week since I announced my grand vision to create Proxy AI, and things are moving at breakneck speed. Let me update you on the financial side of innovation.
Investment Breakdown
I had invested $87 in compute (the legendary flea market Raspberry Pi haul), $130 in USB cables (turns out you need the "data transfer" kind, not just the charging ones), and $75 in a used power supply that the seller assured me "probably won't explode." These are tangible values that I can write in an Excel sheet and that my wife can point to when explaining to her mother why we're eating ramen for dinner again.
What I can't quantify is the countless hours of my time spent writing code and tinkering with electricity. I can't use my thumb to unlock my phone anymore, but I read that fingerprints do grow back even after a burn. The doctor seemed less optimistic, but what do medical professionals know about the sacrifices required for technological revolution?
Scaling Up: From Garage to Cloud
To accomplish my goal, I have no choice but to move this operation from garage mode to data center mode. My wife's ultimatum about the "fire hazard in the closet" may have also influenced this decision.
I went back to the flea market and was able to sell my collection of Pokémon cards in a mystery box. I've collected the cards for over a year from the McDonald's Happy Meals (pro tip: they don't actually check if you have children with you). I can't believe it sold for this much. Though the buyer and his father looked disappointed by the collection. Either way, after taxes (yes, I declare my flea market transactions), I have a little over ten thousand dollars to invest into this endeavor.
Democratizing Technology
Since I'm building something that will help the future of humanity, I've decided to open source my Python script that tied all the Raspberry Pis into one powerful device. As Elon Musk says, "Patents are for the weak." At least I think he said that. Might have been in a dream.
I'll post a detailed view of the process that will allow you, dear reader, to follow a step-by-step guide to recreate this very company. At a click of a button, I have all my training running on the cloud. The house feels empty without the constant noise from the fan. I miss it. Now I have no excuse when my wife calls me from upstairs. I can hear her, I can hear the kids crying. Oh how I miss my fan.
Continuous Learning
While the training was in progress, I've managed to watch all the 3Blue1Brown AI series. I only wish I had watched it before I started my training. That's $100 in server costs that I could have put into his Patreon account. But as they say, "You don't know what you don't know until you've already spent money not knowing it."
Current Results
Alright, let's get down to business. I have now trained an LLM that can write fully formed English sentences. They make no sense, but see for yourself:
> User: What is your name?
> ProxyAI v0.2: Mountain climbing shoes yesterday blue in the doorknob until sunshine.
> User: Tell me about the weather
> ProxyAI v0.2: Weather climate newspaper folding technique requires fourteen elephants minimum for purple train station.
> User: How do I bake a cake?
> ProxyAI v0.2: Cake ingredients: flowers, staples, democracy, underwater basket weaving certificate, the letter J repeated seventeen times.
It's a good start and it barely made a dent into my investment. The syntax is flawless, and with a little imagination, you could argue there's profound meaning hidden in there somewhere.
Future Plans
My main problem is that I have to juggle a full-time job, a family, doom scrolling, and this passion project. If I want to make a big leap in progress, I have to find a way to automate part of my process. I'll build an AI that will act as my Proxy to still do meaningful work while I'm tending to my other responsibilities.
I'll start scraping the web for productivity blogs and use that information to make an AI that is productive. A lot of the content we encounter today is in video format, so I will write down a plan to process video as well and extract content. YouTube transcripts will be useful, and with keyword search, I can strip NordVPN sponsorships. A lot of OpenAI Sora videos featuring humans always look like they are about to plug in NordVPN. I'll strip that out of videos before training.
Coming soon: "How I Convinced My Boss I'm Working While My AI Attends Zoom Meetings" and "The Great Pokemon Card Investment Strategy: A Step-by-Step Guide to Funding Your Startup"
EDIT: Sorry, I've made the mistake of coding directly into the devices. Now that the last of the Pis has given out, I don't have a copy of the code. I wrote it once, I'm sure I can write it again. Probably even better this time. It's all part of the plan. Sometimes you have to burn your ships to conquer new lands. Sometimes your ships just catch fire on their own.
Leave a comment below to join the waitlist for Proxy AI beta access. Priority will be given to those who can explain what my AI's response about cake actually means.
