// ITS FOSS — LINUX & OPEN SOURCE
Local AI Weekly #7: Bubble or Not?
The Reuters proclaimed that the AI bubble has already burst in China. Chinese AI and chip stocks have lost about $480 billion in value. In the West, Amazon has put most of its Nova models on "keep the lights on" mode.
And yet, chip maker SK Hynix posted record profits of $29.7 billion in Q3. Their CEO says the memory shortage runs till 2030. So the bubble is popping for some, but not for the folks selling you RAM. Looks like we have to wait some more for the prices to come down for our homelab expansion.
This edition of Local AI Weekly is supported by PikaPods. You can self-host open source software in under a minute with PikaPods. New users get $5 free credit to try it out.
LokalBot records and transcribes meetings on your computer. No bot joins the call hete and you also get dictation and search, all with local models through llama.cpp on Vulkan or the CPU.
OpenNoteTaker does the same job inside a browser tab. Whisper runs as WebAssembly and your audio is never uploaded. Recording, transcripts and exports are free, no account needed. However, the AI-written minutes and translation are paid extras, though, and they send text to the developer's backend. It's Chrome and Edge only for now.
Subtitld 26.10 is the biggest release yet of this GPL-3.0 subtitle editor. You can go from raw video to timed, translated and dubbed subtitles in one window. It uses whisper.cpp or Vosk for speech, and Piper, Kokoro and others for voices. Many of these run fully offline.
Gregory Kurtzer, the man behind CentOS and Rocky Linux, built Ginux in 11 days. It's a new kernel written mostly in Rust, and it's not Linux.
A Codex agent wrote about 139,000 lines while Kurtzer set the architecture and checked the work. The "G" stands for GPT, by the way, not GNU. Consider it as a research prototype.
Former GitHub CEO Thomas Dohmke launched Entire, a Git forge for humans and agents working together. The pull requests become "Trails" here with eval scores that agents update on every push. The memory plugins are open source and local-first. The forge itself is hosted, so don't expect to self-host it.
Twitter's original founder, Jack Dorsey's Block showed off Dessa, a speech model that listens and talks at the same time. It was trained only on human speech, whereas most AI models are trained on text. Block says it runs on a MacBook Pro with M4 Max or better. There's no word on weights or a license yet, just a waitlist.