Cognira
A self-learning small language model.
Producer’s notes
Most AI models learn everything they’ll ever know before you meet them, then spend the rest of their lives politely forgetting your name. Cognira is my attempt to fix that: a small language model that learns from the people who use it.
Tell it what to call you once, open a brand-new chat, and it still knows. That’s the first half of the film. The second half is a 17-line Python script that puts a robot on cognira.dev and lets you drive it from the browser. An AI that remembers you is nice. An AI that remembers you and has hands is better.
It runs on one 16GB iMac. Not a data centre, not a rack of GPUs. An iMac. There is a status page whose main job is answering the question “is the iMac up?”
I’ve been working on it for about 15 months. Before that came the prototypes, going back to 2023, and they were called “anton”, after Gilfoyle’s server in Silicon Valley. Every serious AI deserves a name with a bit of menace.
I’ve applied to Y Combinator’s Winter 2027 batch with it. Fingers crossed. If you’re reading this from YC: hello. The iMac says hi too.
