System Architecture • The Sovereign HearthLocal-First • Zero Cloud Custody

How PAI Works

PAI is a compact, whisper-quiet neural workstation that lives on your shelf. Your phones, laptops, and tablets connect to it over a private WireGuard mesh. Models, personal memory, and agent orchestration run entirely on bare metal inside your home.

Overview

The Physical Perimeter Model

Every query you submit to a cloud AI model crosses third-party networks, lingers in remote caches, and feeds multitenant training data. PAI flips this topology: compute moves to your data, rather than streaming your life to remote datacenters.

Diagram of how PAI works: your devices reach the PAI box over your private network
Figure 1.0: PAI Local Ingress, Tailscale Mesh & Sovereign Hardware BoundaryZero WAN Listening Ports
Zero-Trust Network Model

Two Doors, One Rule

Traditional home servers require port-forwarding, dynamic DNS, and exposure to automated port scanners. PAI replaces this fragility with a mathematically enforced dual-boundary network architecture.

Door 1: Private Control
You & Authorized Devices

Direct WireGuard Peer Mesh

Your phones, laptops, and tablets connect directly to PAI through a WireGuard overlay network (Tailscale or self-hosted Headscale) tagged tag:pai-box.

  • Zero Inbound Ports: Your router opens zero public WAN ports. UPnP and NAT-PMP are disabled at kernel level.
  • 127.0.0.1 Loopback Binding: The admin UI and inference endpoints bind strictly to localhost and WireGuard interfaces.
  • Mutual TLS Authentication: Every interaction requires verified ed25519 cryptographic key exchange.
Plane: Interactive Control • Read / Write • Low-Latency Voice
Door 2: Blind Ingress
External Services Push In

Edge-Sealed Ciphertext Pipe

Webhooks, incoming emails, and messaging bots arrive over an outbound-initiated tunnel (cloudflared). The Cloudflare edge holds only your public key ($K_{pub}$).

  • Asymmetric Ingress Sealing: Payloads are encrypted with X25519 at the edge before crossing the tunnel boundary.
  • Zero Cloud Decryption: Cloudflare sees only opaque ciphertext. The private key ($K_{priv}$) never leaves your hardware.
  • Human-in-the-Loop Confirmation: Outbound replies drafted by local agents require explicit user approval.
Plane: Blind Ingress Only • Outbound Initiated • Zero Relay
The One Rule Invariant

No unencrypted data ever resides on a third-party server.

Third parties carry only end-to-end ciphertext envelopes or ephemeral transport packets. Your personal conversations, documents, vector embeddings, and model weights live exclusively inside your physical box.

Sovereign Operating System

Sovereign AI Interfaces

PAI OS boots into native sovereign interfaces: Hermes UI for natural voice, chat, and memory exploration, First-Boot Setup for local onboarding, and Rakazo UI for autonomous browser automation.

hermes-cockpit://local.pai/voice-session
LiveKit WebRTC: 490ms loop
Hermes OS voice and chat interface screenshot
Sub-500ms LiveKit Voice

Streaming Silero VAD turn detection with instant barge-in interruption. Natural voice-to-voice conversation.

SQLite-vec Memory Graph

Single-file deterministic vector index. Search conversations, notes, and local documents with zero cloud sync.

Local Model Telemetry

Real-time token speed counter, unified memory allocation gauges, and temperature monitoring on bare metal.

LiveKit & Voice AI Engine

Sub-500ms Real-Time Voice Architecture

Built on the LiveKit Agents SDK and WebRTC real-time media transport. Engineered for sub-500ms conversational turn-taking with instant barge-in interruption and offline local fallback.

490 msTotal Voice Loop
STAGE 1~40 ms

VAD & Ingest

Silero VAD runs client-side frame-by-frame with WebRTC echo cancellation and adaptive noise reduction.

Engine: Silero VAD v5
STAGE 2~120 ms

Streaming STT

Zero-latency streaming transcription. Local Whisper or Deepgram streaming emits partials every 80ms.

Engine: Whisper / Deepgram
STAGE 3~180 ms

Local TTFT

llama.cpp and Ollama stream first token (TTFT) directly into synthesis buffer with speculative decoding.

Engine: llama.cpp / Ollama
STAGE 4~150 ms

Streaming TTS

Sentence-chunked audio synthesis via Kokoro local TTS or ElevenLabs streaming directly over WebRTC audio track.

Engine: Kokoro / ElevenLabs
Verified Component Architecture

The Verified PAI OS Software Stack

Every layer of PAI OS is built on audited, battle-tested open-source and local-first software. No proprietary lock-in.

Agent Runtimes
  • Hermes AgentPrimary conversational engine & multi-profile bot supervisor.
  • Rakazo EnginePersistent autonomous browser automation with full DOM state.
  • Paperclip PlatformBoard-level company task orchestration and review workflows.
  • CrewAI & OpenClawRole-based subagent teams and cross-agent event routing.
Inference & Serving
  • Ollama & llama.cppBare-metal GGUF tensor inference on unified RAM (Vulkan/Metal/CUDA).
  • LiteLLM Unified ProxyResilient local model router with automatic rate-limit cascading.
  • LM Studio RunnerLocal developer playground and one-click model quant evaluations.
  • AirLLC AcceleratorLow-latency model serving optimization and caching layer.
Omni-Channel Ingress
  • Cloudflare Email & HimalayaEdge-sealed X25519 inbound email with local CLI terminal IMAP/SMTP.
  • Telegram Bot BridgeDirect local Telegram bot handling mobile prompts and alerts.
  • WhatsApp & iMessageBaileys web bridge and local BlueBubbles / AppleScript gateway.
  • Signal & MatrixZero-trust end-to-end encrypted messaging connectors.
Memory & Local Cloud
  • SQLite-vec WALDeterministic semantic vector embeddings stored on local disk.
  • Tailscale MeshWireGuard peer-to-peer overlay network with zero WAN port forwarding.
  • Local Cloud (Seafile)Self-hosted private document synchronization across all user devices.
  • LUKS2 + TPM2Hardware-bound full disk encryption protecting data at rest.
Multi-Protocol Connectivity

Omni-Channel Ingress & Local Cloud

Interact with your assistant through whatever tools you already use every day. PAI routes each channel according to strict cryptographic boundaries.

Email & Messaging

Cloudflare Email + Himalaya

Inbound emails are sealed with ChaCha20-Poly1305 at the Cloudflare edge worker before transit. PAI unseals them locally and indexes them into your private semantic memory.

• Client: Himalaya CLI (local IMAP/SMTP)
• Sealing: X25519 public key envelope
• Drafts: Sandbox review before send
Chat Platforms

Telegram, WhatsApp & iMessage

Run dedicated chat bots directly on your box. Telegram long-polling connects outbound without open ports. Optional WhatsApp (Baileys) and iMessage (BlueBubbles) bridges keep conversations in sync.

• Telegram: Outbound polling (no webhooks)
• WhatsApp: Baileys Web protocol engine
• E2EE: Native Signal & Matrix gateways
Storage & Vector Index

Seafile Cloud & SQLite-vec

Full personal cloud syncing powered by self-hosted Seafile. Context, knowledge, and conversation embeddings live in an in-process SQLite-vec WAL database on high-speed NVMe storage.

• Sync: Seafile file synchronization
• Embeddings: SQLite-vec cosine KNN
• Security: LUKS2 + TPM2 disk encryption
Hardware Tiers

Engineered for Every Workload

From compact fanless gateways to dual-slot eGPU workstation powerhouses, PAI hardware is purpose-built for high-throughput local inference.

ModelProcessor & MemoryModel CapacityExpansion & I/OLaunch Price
PAI Pro 128Flagship WorkstationAMD Ryzen 9 7940HS
128 GB LPDDR5X (7500 MT/s)
70B Quantized Models
Full Mixtral 8x22B
Dual 2.5GbE • OCuLink (64Gbps)
PCIe Gen4 NVMe • GaN 100W
$1,199 $2,999
PAI Starter 64 / 32Balanced Home ServerAMD Ryzen 7 7840HS
64 GB or 32 GB Expandable
14B – 32B Dense Models
DeepSeek R1 Distill 14B
2.5GbE • USB4 40Gbps
M.2 NVMe • GaN 65W
$699 $1,499
PAI EdgeCompact GatewayQuad-Core Low Power
16 GB Unified Memory
7B – 8B Fast Quant Models
Llama 3.1 8B Instant
Dual 1GbE • Fanless
Ultra-quiet 15W TDP
$399 $799
PAI GPU DockOCuLink AcceleratorOCuLink SFF-8611 PCIe 4.0 x4
750W Titanium GaN PSU
Supports RTX 4090 / 5090
Zero Bottleneck 64 Gbps
Dual-Slot Full Length
Tool-free Magnetic Enclosure
$449 $899
PAI OSSoftware Image OnlyAny x86-64 Hardware
Minimum 16 GB RAM
Determined by host hardware
Automatic model selection
Flashable USB Image
Atomic bootc dual-slot updates
$59 $149
Reserve Your Sovereign Hearth

Ready to own your private intelligence?

Lock in your priority founder allocation with up to 60% launch discount on hardware workstations, or download PAI OS to turn your existing hardware into a sovereign AI server.