CrankGPT is the latest AI chatbot in town, with a big twist

Whether it’s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or some other big-tech chatbot, these tools have become an inseparable part of modern life. As user demand for chatbots grows, so does the need for more natural resources. A Europe-based company, Squeez Labs, has now revealed a chatbot concept that aims to make generative AI cost-effective and less resource-intensive, using a simple hand crank.

Cleverly named CrankGPT, this little box has no battery and relies entirely on a crank to generate power. To put it simply, it behaves like a conventional chatbot but is powered entirely by turning the crank. Inside this small box is a 20W hand-crank generator powered by a stock Raspberry Pi 5 with 8GB of RAM (via Gizmodo).

This efficient arrangement allows CrankGPT to recognize what you say, process it, and then deliver the answer using the Piper voice model. As one would expect, small models are best suited to run on the CrankGPT, with the creators recommending the 350M and 1.2B variants of Liquid AI LFM2, or Gemma (1B).

As the video above shows, the CrankGPT is anything but quiet. However, this is a small compromise for a device that is supposed to be both private and energy-efficient. While the creators have reportedly tried to generate images, poetry, and even code using CrankGPT, the device is evidently better suited for small, everyday queries.

The developers have also integrated a cooling fan to keep any heat in check. They add that the crank can get “a lot harder to turn” when speech synthesis and LLM inference happen simultaneously.

Perhaps the best argument for a device of this size and capability is that it runs on a fully local model that is always under the user’s control.

“It offended our European small-practical-car sensibilities to see people around us throwing kilowatts and thousands of tokens at tasks small models could accomplish just as well as huge ones, for a fraction of the cost and energy,” the CrankGPT creators said.

The CrankGPT website lays out the case for this product pretty well, though there’s no information related to a broader launch or a potential price tag. You can request a demo of the device, however.

Regardless of whether this product becomes more than a concept one day, it shows that there are ways to use AI without it impacting our natural resources. However, it’s worth remembering that training these AI models also bears a heavy burden on the earth’s resources, so until that part’s figured out, these solutions can only go so far.

But with that being said, the CrankGPT could be the start of something bigger, especially as AI becomes a more integral part of our lives, for better or worse.