Build AI Tools You Control
Fable 5 went dark on Saturday. Here’s how to build AI systems no one can take away from you.
Anthropic released Fable 5 on Tuesday. By Friday, the US government had ordered Anthropic to cut off access to all foreign nationals, forcing it to shut down the model for every customer to remain compliant. Three days from launch to shutdown, and a frontier model that millions of people were using was gone.
Some people spent last week building with Fable 5, but you’re the person on your team who already runs AI tools locally, so a frontier model going down didn’t affect you.
For those of you who aren’t this person or that team yet, this was hopefully the wake-up call you needed to start owning more of your AI stack.
The good news is that the tools you need to build with are free.
Work through the builds below in order, or pick whichever sounds closest to what you’re working on this week.
Run a model on your own machine
n8n. local. A private AI agent on your laptop, no API keys.
How To Fine-Tune and Deploy an LLM Without an ML Engineer. A support assistant grounded in your own docs, running locally.
Use it on a recurring job
I Built an AI Agent That Sends Me My Numbers Every Monday Morning.
Build a RAG System with NotebookLM in Under an Hour.
Build Your Own AI Productivity App with Codex.
Give it memory so it stops losing your context
I Built a Second Brain to Help Me Run My Company.
Every Time You Start a New Chat, You Lose Everything. Here’s How I Fix That.
How We Use Agentic AI to Help Us Make Big Product Design Decisions.
How to Use AI to Do the Executive Function Stuff Your Brain Skips Over.
What this means for how work is changing
AI Agents Are Redesigning Workflows. Your New Skill Is Staying in Motion.
Agentic AI Matters More to ADHD Brains Than Getting Faster Answers.
This week on The Data Letter: Wednesday’s live session is free and open to everyone. We’re going deep on local model selection, hardware sizing, and quantization, so you walk out knowing which model fits your machine.
Three pieces of free software install a private AI on your laptop gets published Thursday, with the full build ready to deploy.
Read it here:
Three pieces of free software install a private AI on your laptop.
The operators, managers, and technical teams I write for will spend the next year having two kinds of conversations about AI. The first is the one most people are still having: which vendor should we use, what does it cost, and what happens if they raise their prices?
There are more and more conversations about Small Language Models for a reason… Great piece
I tried local AI models and have indeed bought a MacBook so that I can test them. But whoa, even with a powerful machine, it ended up really slowing it down. I am gonna try again with probably a smaller model this time.