Nanochat (Karpathy’s Project): The "Best ChatGPT $100 Can Buy"
Andrej Karpathy is back, and he's building hardware. 'Nanochat' is a Raspberry Pi-based device that does one thing: run a small LLM locally with near-zero latency. It's the anti-cloud device.
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The Spec Sheet
For $100, you get a Pi 5, a dedicated NPU hat, and a cute little e-ink display. It runs 'BabyLlama', a 1.5B parameter model that Karpathy trained himself. It's not smart enough to write code, but it's smart enough to be a witty desktop companion. And unlike the $699 Humane Pin, it actually works.
The 'Always On' Philosophy
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The magic isn't the model; it's the form factor. Because it's always on and not listening to the cloud, you talk to it differently. It's a 'digital pet' that passes the Turing test (barely). It's a toy, but it's the most fun AI toy since the Tamagotchi. It sits on your desk, listens for its wake word (processed locally), and responds instantly.
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Why It Matters
This is the democratization of AI hardware. You don't need a PhD or a Series A to build an AI device. You need a soldering iron and a GitHub repo. Karpathy is showing us that the future of AI isn't just massive data centers; it's also billions of tiny, local intelligences embedded in everything.
