Most AI development today is centered around services. Companies offer tailored insights and powerful agents that can replicate all aspects of the human experience. AI is supposedly “passing the bar exam”, diagnosing medical issues, and everything in-between. What is the role of a human being in an increasingly online world?

In practice, AI is a complex web of big data sources (e.g. the entirety of the internet). Pairing massive amounts of data with increasingly powerful cloud computing capabilities has resulted in unprecedented software development capabilities. Adopting naming practices and principles from science fiction stories, Silicon Valley is racing down a path towards a fictional idea of a “sentient computer” with AGI. Artificial intelligence is a field gives us more modalities and capabilities to use with computers, and what really matters is how we (as humans) use the technology at hand.

Not that long ago, computing was grounded in the idea that digital literacy was a skill to be adopted and used in service of greater problems to be solved. We, as individuals, had control over our data, our files, our thoughts. Over the past several years, Big Tech has traded us systems of addictive social media sites for yottabytes of our personal data in the service of “personalization” - a.k.a targeted advertising.

Memory Cache is an exploration into human-first artificial intelligence, starting with the actual idea of the personal computer. The project is an experiment in local, on-premise AI: what you can do with a standard gaming desktop that sits in your home, and actually works for you. It bridges your browser history with your local file system, so that you can use the power of openly licensed AI and open source code to inspect, query, and tinker with an AI that is under your own control.