Episode 0 — No Brain, No Gain

Growing a Brain — Episode 0: No Brain, No Gain

We’re starting with a blank canvas.
No pretrained weights. No secret datasets.
Just curiosity, and a belief that “AI” should be open like math and physics.

The Growing a Brain (GAB) in Public series is our long-term experiment in building transparent, additive intelligence. We are sharing every neuron we grow — in public, from zero. Think of it as open-source cognition: how a brain grows like a child, taking in byte by byte (pun intended).

Our guiding principle:

If we can’t explain it to a nine-year-old, we don’t deploy it.

This is not about racing toward AGI.
It’s about understanding what real understanding is.

🧩 The First Experiment...

is two-fold.

1. Part One is an online version of the BRAIN, a Pi network if you will. We're calling it Web 3.14. The ultimate goal is for it to be as open as Web 1.0 was intended to be.

   All core data consumed by the Pi network will be open-source.

2. Part Two is a standalone BRAIN hardware, which will ideally run both online and off!

   Our initial lab choice is a Raspberry Pi. We're calling this baby Buildy Pi.

His first lesson is simple but symbolic; he learns the alphabet (A - Z).

Here, baby Buildy Pi doesn’t generate essays or code. He simply discovers that letters exist — he sees them, hears them, remembers them. Each exposure brightens a tiny neuron. A first spark of additive intelligence.

🧠 What Comes Next

Over the coming days, Buildy Pi will begin to discover more symbols before forming associations.

One near-future milestone is for him to be able to play our own SV x Games, such as Trendley. Even just this goal will take some time to achieve, since Buildy Pi starts with zero neurons.

We shall document his progress — as well as ours — right here.

Join us as we grow the simplest of brains, in the open.