One person, a few ordinary computers, and a great deal of open-source software made by others.
Joshua is made by Fabio De Ponte, a journalist who reports on artificial intelligence and teaches other journalists how to use it.
He is doing a PhD on how language emerges among AI agents.
He also builds the Yattaphone, a phone you make yourself from a Raspberry Pi.
The personal computer came with a simple promise: the machine on your desk is yours. Artificial intelligence is moving the other way, into the data centres of a few companies.
Joshua is an attempt to bring it back to the desk: small enough to run at home, open enough to understand, simple enough to install without being an engineer. It is not a company and it sells nothing. The manifesto says the rest.
Joshua is written with the help of AI coding assistants and tested on ordinary Macs, from an 8 GB M1 to a 16 GB M4. It stands on the work of others: Ollama, the Qwen models, Gradio, mlx and many more. Every line of Joshua's own code is on GitHub.
Write to info@joshua.earth. For bugs and ideas, open an issue on GitHub.