I took a photo of the fence and asked it to overlay a potted Jasmin espaliered to it, after a couple of tweaks, and all of about one minute later, it gave me this:

During a recent conversation with a diving buddy, he pulled out his phone mid conversation and said "Hey Grok, show me that dive computer we were talking about this morning." And yes, it's $580 worth of gorgeous.

Its translation abilities are spectacular, and occasionally hilarious. It really is the Babel fish. Not that long ago I moved to a bank simply because it supported Apple Pay years before the big players. At that time, paying with just the tap of a wrist always garnered astonishment and commentary. Around the same time, voice assistants started crossing the line from novelty to genuinely useful. Set a timer, make an appointment, play some music. Super!

"Alexa, turn the kitchen light on." Light comes on. "No, turn it off." "There is no device called 'it' to turn off." Oof!

No memory, no context.

Enter Nabu (yes I know, I haven't got round to changing the wakeword name yet). Naby knows it turned the kitchen light on, and knows I was referring to the kitchen light when I said "turn it off." It remembers, it has context, because it's not just a dumb voice assistant anymore, it is plumbed into my local AI.

The big commercial AI platforms can be connected to these systems, but running it locally means the data stays within the boundaries of my house. It won't process that mountain of documents or win that tricky legal case yet, but it can keep track of the state of my home and understand what I mean when I speak naturally.

That's a big deal - because now I don't have to write and memorize tiresome automations for rigid pre-programmed commands, I can converse with Nabu in human and it understands "all the lights" or "just the downstairs aircons."

Only five years ago, running an AI model at home was a ridiculous proposition - you'd need datacenter hardware and a tech-bro budget. Now, it's dramatically cheaper and easier - with consumer GPUs, mini PCs, Ollama and Hugging Face, technically curious people are quietly building surprisingly capable AI systems at home. The GPU that I can hold in my hands doesn't compete with a datacenter the size of several football fields - but for my homelab tinkerings, it's surprisingly capable, and is only becoming more so.