Singapore’s Foreign Minister assembled a personal AI agent on a Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM. He hasn’t dared switch it off in three months. He is not an engineer.

That’s the story. But the interesting part is what he learned building it - and why he built it at all.

Dr Vivian Balakrishnan gave a 22-minute talk at AI Engineer Singapore on 16 May. He described himself as a practitioner with a day job - “a retired eye surgeon who took a detour into politics, perhaps for too long.” The talk is worth watching in full. His framing of what AI agents are actually useful for cuts through more noise than most conference keynotes manage.

Continue reading →

I wanted to know if my AI subscription was earning its keep. So I repriced 30 days of real usage at pay-per-token rates and compared it to what I actually pay.

The answer: $96 USD equivalent in tokens consumed. My subscription costs $100 USD a month. That’s not a rounding error - that’s a subscription running at near-full utilisation.

Not a prototype. Not a weekend experiment. A system I actually depend on - morning briefings, task management, research, document work, health tracking, portfolio analysis. The Autonomi, as I call it, runs continuously and does real work.

Continue reading →