The Hot Air Factory is a mini computer that turns hidden AI energy costs into a physical reality

"Equipped with a cartoonishly small pinwheel, air is pushed out of the top of the mini factory, creating a sense of lo-fi acknowledgement of energy costs that is funny as it is politically urgent. "It works just like all the cloud AI services, with the difference that The Hot Air Factory never connects to the cloud - everything stays there in your living room. All the AI computation happens there," says Matteo."

"Oio's creative technologist Marta Fioravanti coded the AI functionalities and Bjørn Karmann designed the physical box and pinwheel, whilst visual designer Léane Beauquis was responsible for all the branding and UI design, together with the 3D renders and animations. It took a few weeks of full immersion from the team to put together the final metaphor of the piece, first going through ideas like a power grid simulator or a village of NPC peasants literally farming energy for AI overlords, but in the end, the pinwheel was the winner."

"The Hot Air Factory is ornamental and pretty, which is part of the point. Oio strive to make technology more understandable through playfulness and simple interactions - it's accessible to young and old alike, who may not fully grasp the physical reality of invisible costs. Under the hood, it's a technically impressive and complicated machine, running open-source large language models on a GPU, but on the outside, the factory uses intelligent and straightforward visual language to get the point across."

The Hot Air Factory is a 3D-printable, ornamental tabletop device that runs open-source large language models locally on a GPU and intentionally avoids cloud connections. A cartoonishly small pinwheel physically signals energy use by pushing air from the top, creating a lo-fi, playful acknowledgement of computational energy costs with political urgency. The piece resulted from a few weeks of focused collaboration between technologists, hardware and visual designers who iterated metaphors before selecting the pinwheel. The exterior presents a utopian, accessible aesthetic while the interior performs complex AI computation, making invisible costs tangible and understandable across ages.

Read at Itsnicethat