Jailbroke Google Nest Mini run your own LLMs, agents and voice models

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7 points·pmastela··6 comments

I'm surprised there's such little hardware (just a small PCB) in the Nest. Appreciate that source tweet puts "jailbreak" in quotes, it's a board replacement in the shell of Google Nest peripherals.

Are there other smart assistants that we can now get for cheap, that have usable and rootable hardware on them to run custom LLMs?

> ... such little hardware (just a small PCB) in the Nest.

> ... have usable and rootable hardware on them to run custom LLMs

All the heavy-lifting is done on the server, hence the board replacement—no need to root. Install your own board with your own firmware which communicates with your own API/servers—where all heavy-lifting is done.

"smart assistants" are glorified iOT microphone/speaker combos which get all their magic from their connected microservices. A warrantless wiretap, if you will.

I don't think it makes any sense to be running custom LLMs on-hardware on these devices. They're too small and too low power to be doing so. It makes a ton of sense to hack their small, specialized hardware for speech-detection to forward that to your own servers, though, and I'd love to see that article.

It's not really a "jailbreak," they replaced the entire PCB, but it makes sense because Google sells these almost certainly below their own cost (when they do the promotions), and overwhelmingly below the cost that you'd have to pay to get a decent enclosure.

Is it really a jailbreak if you swap your own custom PCB?

Not by my definition.

Well if the post says it is a “jail break” then it is. Case closed. I mean open. Sorry.

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