Cornerstone · the device

Your family’s AI. On hardware you own.

Cornerstone’s software already encrypts your data so we can’t read it. The device closes the last gap: a small computer in your house that runs the family’s AI and holds its memory — so the everyday case never leaves the building. The honest version of owning your data.

🔊 Hear this page — in my own voice

The short version, “explain it like I’m 10,” and a personal note — in my own cloned voice.

The one thing software can’t do.

Client-side encryption fixes storage — we hold only ciphertext. But two things still touch our servers: the AI itself (a kid’s question goes to a cloud model, even if governed) and reachability (phones and laptops aren’t a stable home for the data). The box closes both, because it moves the compute home, not just the storage — and no amount of encryption can do that from the cloud. The box answers what it can locally and escalates only genuinely hard asks, visibly, on a ceiling you set.

What the box does

Runs the AI at home

The family’s AI answers most questions on the box itself, and only escalates a genuinely hard one to a frontier model — visibly, and only if you allow it. The ordinary case never leaves the building.

Holds the vault

Your photos, documents, and the kids’ AI memory live on the box’s own disk. Here the box is the client: the keys are held with your family, on your hardware — not on our server.

The always-on node

Phones and laptops come and go; the box is always there. It’s the durable member of your device mesh, so your data always has a live home — and off-site backup runs from here.

Audio stays home

Local speech-to-text and text-to-speech, so a spoken question and its spoken answer never round-trip to the cloud. Round-tripping the audio would defeat the whole point.

Survives the house

It originates the encrypted off-site backup — ciphertext to cold storage — so even fire or theft can’t erase the family’s memory. We hold nothing but sealed bytes.

Works offline

HiveJournal itself, packaged and running on the box, degrading gracefully when the internet is down. The whole thing runs on your box, not our cloud — you can even pull the cable and watch it keep working.

Watch what it connects to

A panel shows every port the box has open and every connection it makes — each labeled in plain language, with history. See for yourself that when you asked nothing hard, nothing left. Verification you can watch, not a promise you have to trust.

What it takes — and why v1 is a box you can already buy.

The local AI is deliberately light (a small on-device model + a fast deterministic language engine; the heavy work escalates to the cloud), so the first Cornerstone device is commodity hardware — no manufacturing, no waiting. Here’s the shape of it.

The v1 device
A commodity x86-64 mini-PC — nothing to manufacture, nothing to wait for.
Compute
6–8 modern cores; an integrated NPU or small GPU is an upgrade, not a requirement (the local AI tier is deliberately light).
Memory
16–32 GB.
Storage
1–4 TB NVMe — your photos and documents get large; the mesh adds redundancy.
Network
Wired gigabit preferred, for reliable in-home mesh replication.
In the home
Small, quiet, always-on, low-power — it lives like a router, not a PC. No screen; you manage it from the Family Wall.

What’s real today — and what isn’t.

  • Working now, no box needed: the encrypted vault, the device mesh, recovery, and off-site backup all run on the phones and laptops you already have. The box makes them better; it isn’t required.
  • Being designed, in the open: the device itself — a reference build on a commodity mini-PC we’ll dogfood in a real home (ours) first. No manufacturing spend until it works there.
  • The honest tension: reaching the box from outside your house needs a secure tunnel — a small crack in “nothing leaves,” which you can turn off. We’d rather name that than pretend it away.

We’re building it for our own family first. The waitlist tells us whether families want the box badly enough to build the productized version — before a dollar of hardware spend.

Tell us you’d want the box.

You don’t have to wait for it — the software tiers work today. But if a small computer that keeps your family’s AI and memory physically in your home is the version you want, say so, and we’ll build it toward you.

The Cornerstone device — your family’s AI, on hardware you own | HiveJournal