Hello world! I'm Ibrahim, and welcome to the very first entry in what I hope will become the most important technology blog of our generation. Today marks the beginning of my journey to create what I'm calling Proxy AI - an artificial intelligence that will do things so you don't have to. But first, let me tell you how it all began.
The Accidental Acquisition
I found a box of Raspberry Pi 4s at a flea market last weekend. The merchant, an elderly man with questionable pricing strategies, sold it to me by weighing it on a fruit scale and charging me by the pound. $87.42 for approximately 50 Raspberry Pis - a steal by any measure!
My wife was not happy with my purchase, given that she had sent me to buy diapers and milk for our newborn twins. In my defense, I did eventually get the diapers. The milk, however, completely slipped my mind as I fantasized about the computing possibilities on my drive home.
The box was left in my attic for a few years before I rediscovered it after having mastered diaper changing and using my kids as the ultimate excuse to avoid social gatherings. "Sorry, can't make it to your birthday party, the twins have a... thing." Works every time.
Technical Setup: The Power Problem
Now I decided to do something with these devices. Of the 50 or so Raspberry Pis, a couple were defective, but I didn't know that until I started running code that randomly threw segmentation faults. Trial and error eventually narrowed down the culprits.
I daisy-chained the devices together and wrote a Python script that connected all the devices to run as one. Can you guess what the most challenging part was?
In the old days, one of the features Microsoft bragged about in Windows 98 was that a single computer could handle 127 USB devices concurrently. Now, it's 2025, we have USB-C. I only have 50 devices to plug in. I got the cables and the hubs, I daisy-chained (I think I like daisy) the hubs and the devices, but before I plugged the power in, I had to do some thinking.
I've dropped out of electronic engineering school, so bear with me here. 50 devices, running on 5V each at 3A. V times I times 50. That's 750W. My laptop power supply says 150W. I may have flunked at school, but I knew my root USB-C cable couldn't handle that.
After a few trips to Home Depot, and watching several videos from Matt from DIY Perks, all the devices are running with some power to spare. I've set up a custom power distribution system using modified ATX power supplies and some electrical components that I'm pretty sure are being used correctly. The setup has only caught fire twice, which I consider a major success.
Training the Brain
I was disappointed to find that Lex Fridman's GitHub repo didn't have exactly what I needed. Luckily for me, I've completed every course Andrew Ng has ever recorded online. In little to no time, I've downloaded an English language corpus, Wikipedia English dump, and my Raspberry Pis are whirring in the closet.
I had to put them in the closet, with a floor fan running at full speed over the power cables. I'll revisit my setup whenever Matt publishes a new video. I hope it will be about water cooling, as my wife is starting to complain about the "burning plastic smell" whenever I run my training scripts for more than four hours.
Results So Far
Model initialized..........
Loading vocab size: 287564 words
epoch 1/2937465: loss 9.87654
epoch 2/2937465: loss 9.87653
epoch 3/2937465: loss 9.87649
...
epoch 39/2937465: loss 9.87401
The progress is undeniable. At this rate, I'll reach human-level performance in just 74 years, but I'm certain I can optimize this further.
What's Next?
There you go folks. I have my first language model. It writes English, I think. I'll make an in-depth dive into my training setup in a future post. For now, stay tuned and follow along as I turn this small endeavor into an AGI - an Artificial Intelligence for the general public.
Coming soon: Proper Cooling Techniques for AI Hardware. Why My Wife's Hair Dryer Isn't Working. Learning to Live with a Fan Blowing Full Speed 24/7.
Leave a comment below or subscribe to my newsletter for weekly updates on Proxy AI's development. Special thanks to the flea market guy, whoever you were.
