Offline · on-device · open source
PlayaPal
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.
Staged right here on this page — no backend, no signal, sample event. Which is the point: this is the exact shape of the real thing. It searches the guide stored on your phone, then answers like a friend.
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.
The serious arguments against AI deserve serious answers, so here they are — because building it small, local, and open flips every honest argument on its head: you get the benefits while falling to none of them.
Isn't AI flooding the burn with low-effort slop?▾
A lot of it is, and the artists are right to be angry. So here's what this is not: it generates no art, no logos, no camp songs — nothing anyone passes off as their own creativity. It's a guidebook that answers questions, and its favorite move is pointing you at things humans made: real events, real camps, real art out on the open playa. A compass toward the human-made stuff, not a replacement for it.
Big tech already colonized the playa. Why bring AI too?▾
This isn't big tech. No corporation, no venture capital, no pitch deck, no plan to disrupt anything. One burner, a garage, one second-hand GPU, and a pocket guidebook that admits what it doesn't know. It doesn't want your attention, your data, or your future — it wants you to find the pancakes.
Techno-utopianism sells AI as civilization's answer. This is the counter-argument you can hold in your hand: small, local, humble, and yours.
AI datacenters drink rivers. How is this okay?▾
That critique is real — and it's exactly why this project is built the way it is. All the training we did ran on one second-hand Intel GPU in a home closet: about 0.16 kWh per training run, measured live at 252 watts — roughly one old incandescent bulb. The entire training program cost well under a dollar of electricity, total.
Answering a question on your phone draws about what the flashlight does. No datacenter, no evaporative cooling, no water. The base model is open weights that already exist for everyone; our published recipe adds the playa smarts for less energy than a string of camp lights burns in a night. Leave No Trace, applied to compute.
+ the receipts
- hardware1× second-hand Intel Arc B70
- draw under load252 W, measured at the wall
- per training run≈ 0.16 kWh
- whole program3 training runs · ≈ 6.8 GPU-hours
- electricity, total< $1
Every AI product is a data-mining operation.▾
Nothing to mine, nowhere to send it. It runs in airplane mode — there is no server, no account, no analytics, not even crash reporting. Your 3am questions stay between you and your phone, all week. Leave No Trace, applied to data: the week leaves no exhaust.
Won't this glue people to their phones — one more crutch?▾
It's the anti-feed. No notifications, no scroll, no engagement loop, no streak begging you back. You ask, it answers, you put the phone away — a 30-second lookup instead of a 30-minute doomscroll. And because it needs zero infrastructure, it makes the gear you already carry more capable when everything else is dark. Radical Self-Reliance shouldn't stop at your water supply.
Okay. So what's the catch — who's monetizing this?▾
Nobody. Free, no ads, no upsell, no premium tier, no email capture — there's no account to capture. It's a gift in the plain burner sense: made for the city, given to the city. Code, weights, and the training recipe publish openly at release, so the gift includes the means of making more gifts. Decommodification isn't a vibe here; it's the architecture.
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.