Originally published as an Advisory Hour Substack post on 2026-07-26. This local copy preserves the text and public supporting media alongside the research record.
Original post
I had a strange turn of events that brought about this character. If you subscribe to my substack, then you’ll have noticed the trend of virtual worlds, characters, and experimentation with set, setting and place. Identity, coherence, and consistency are fast-follows on those considerations. I make things, right?
One of the most interesting bits of hardware was is the Jetson. I'll admit to being completely flummoxed by the device. I’ve shared many writings about how I was wrong, and how I’ve come to love this little small block of hardware. And incredibly, someone reached out to me with a proposition. The recent battery of AI changes had created a situation for them.
The Problem
The public Ai company was caught looking into chats, another had changed a model which completely derailed their project, and they received an unexpected bill for AI capability for a set of tasks that did not require 152 IQ super-smart AI. “Eric, I just want the model to work the same tomorrow. I don’t want to be told I can’t do something because it’s unsafe, which seems to be a roll of the dice for either ChatGPT or Claude. And I sure as heck don’t need to be training their models on my work!”
This intrigued me, to say the least. “OK, how can I help?”
“You’ve built these local AI things. Can you build one for me? I just need it to work the same. I can’t change my workflow every time there’s a new update or patch. In fact, I’d prefer not to even have to update the thing.”
“So, say something that just lives on your network. Maybe you can open up a chat window with it? It’d not be quite as smart, but it’d do whatever you want. There wouldn’t be updates-not unless you rolled them yourself.”
“That’d be perfect. I don’t want to build the thing. I just want it to work. Can you help me out on this?”
I remember pondering how this might work. This person didn’t need a Jetson. They needed the other Jetson character. They needed a Rosie.
Rosie
Rosie from a character perspective has some soft colors that if you know what to look for are a tip of the hat to the iconic Jetson’s TV show Rosie herself. The difference is that the Rosie I’m building pulls in on modern cultural meme, threads and sensibilities. She’s also busy at work.
One of my favorite features of Local AI is the positive value it adds in your life. I wrote a few weeks back about how the hardware investment was reaching a point of paying for itself. You may disagree with my methods, but from my perspective they’re valid. The case I’d make is that I’m using local AI to do a task that I’d otherwise default to a frontier AI to solve. A rebuttal on this would be something like “why didn’t you just swap to a local cost model from the lab?”. That’s not the point. The point is about human nature. I find myself, and observe in others, we just pick run the highest tier AI and pull the slot machine to see what tokens come tumbling out. We can’t be bothered to switch-it’s not just me that does this.
The advantage of giving talks is learning what people are doing. The consequence is that I now know a lot of people doing this “pick the highest tier and pull the slot machine” for results. It may shock some of you to learn that real humans make conscious decisions to use GPT-5x Pro (yes, Pro) on building marketing powerpoint decks. Is Pro really the best use of that level of intelligence? When I pressed on why that was done I was told quite a story. “Why wouldn’t I want to use the smartest AI model on my task? My job is very important to the company.”
So given that behavior: I price the cost savings based on what I’d pay if I were using frontier Ai off their API. This means that I can get a real sense of how much I’ve saved so far. I don’t mean $150 per output token frontier pricing-I’m a man with restraint, after all. My ROI is priced as if the tokens in were $15 per million tokens and tokens out at $30 per million. The result of this math is that across the Jetson so far I’m rapidly approaching break-even. And even an early build of Rosie’s command center has already saved $1.76. The question that’s been on my mind: has there ever been a device you can own that quite literally adds value in a measured way to one’s life like this?
Rosie on Order
The thing is that Rosie just solves a real problem for a very specific and group of people that value privacy and control over any benefits from a public SaaS API.
If you’re a hardware or Codex/Claude CLI guru who slings Hermes or Claw like Batman and Robin, then a Rosie won’t make sense to you-unless you’d just like the fact the hardware comes assembled and preloaded with a bunch of “known to work models”. That’s ok-it’s ok if you look at all this with skepticism.
Rosie isn’t for someone who lives in that world. It’s for people in the other part of the world-the people who just need local AI. Someone that needs a stable AI model that won’t change out from under them, whose creative work doesn’t pulled into the training corpus shared around the world, or be at risk of someone in a country or state you don’t even live in telling you what you can and can’t think about. Rosie isn’t solving Erdos math or coding problems, but then… is that what you need? There’s a lot of people that aren’t math or coding gurus. Lot of people just need copy for a marketing brochure, or need a little help in writing their blog, book, or magazine.
I don’t even have a website for this. I may add a blurb to my personal domain at some point about it. We’ll see how it goes.
So if you’d like a Rosie, message me. As of today, I officially have a backlog. I’m not selling hardware, and I’m not selling software. I’m selling Rosie: a private digital character who lives on your network, remembers you, and can acquire new senses and capabilities over time-at your decision. The box is simply where she lives.
Connected work
- Rosie: Local AI and Software Radio Watcher: Follow Rosie as she gains a radio receiver, transcription pipeline, and reading room.
- The Little Local API That Could, Mostly: Meet the local service that gives Rosie models, jobs, and practical boundaries.
- Routes and capabilities: Inspect the local API surface behind the character.