Playa
Pal
An AI companion that works where nothing else does.
On your phone. In airplane mode. In a whiteout at 3am on the open playa.
No cloud, no account, no signal — none needed, ever.
What it is
A small, fully open AI model that lives entirely on your phone, tuned to be a warm, funny, genuinely useful guide to Black Rock City — and wired to read real data locally: the event guide, survival essentials, city geography. Ask it anything a dusty friend would know.
Tiny model, real brain
A 2.6-billion-parameter open-weights model, fine-tuned for playa life and quantized to run fast on ordinary phones.
Looks things up
It doesn't guess your sunrise yoga — it searches the actual event guide and survival manual stored on your phone, then answers like a person.
Data packs
Drop in your own camp's docs and it becomes your camp's guide. No training, no uploads — just files.
For the AI-skeptical burner
Honestly? This gift is partly for you.
No cloud. Every word is generated on your phone.
No account, no login, no email, no tracking, no analytics.
No corporation between you and your questions.
No cost. Free and open source, forever.
It was built in a garage, trained on a couple of consumer GPUs, and it will be published openly — weights, code, and the recipe. Local-first AI is possible, prosocial, and kind of magical. This is the proof you can hold.
Who you'll meet
The Playa Angel
Your guide. Where's breakfast on burn day, how much water per person, what's a Dusty Mary (it will tell you, honestly, that it doesn't know). Short answers, warm voice, admits its limits.
The Historian soon
A campfire elder for stories and lore — yours to feed with your own camp's history via data packs.
The Teller soon
Keeper of a different kind of bank — one that only accepts deposits of memories and pays interest in gratitude.
Field notes
» Does it really work with no internet?
That's the whole point. Airplane mode is the intended habitat. Download once at home, use all week in the dust.
» What phones?
Recent Androids and iPhones with ~6GB+ of memory run it comfortably. Older phones get a smaller build.
» Will it hallucinate?
Less than you'd think — for facts it reads the actual guide instead of remembering, and it's trained to say "I don't know that one" rather than invent. It's a campfire friend, not a court reporter.
» When can I get it?
Before the burn — with a final event-data update once the 2026 guide is locked. Check back here, or watch for it in the usual burner places.
» Open source?
Yes — app code and model weights, published at release. Bring-your-own-model and bring-your-own-data are first-class.