Curious what you mean by proactive? Could you share a bit more?
I personally wanted an AI that was able to reach out to me about my life before I had to reach out to it. An example, a friend just emailed me asking to meet for at 1pm but I have class at 1:30, so a proactive AI would see that conflict and send me a notification about it, asking if the proposed email it drafted works, then I press send.
My personal setup tracks my mouse movement, keyboard, what’s on my screen, and keeps track of what I’m working on through files on my PC. It can update the backend and then restart it on it’s own, meaning I can develop the thing itself while being away from my PC.
The capabilities are more than what I’ve listed, but I want to avoid being too preachy about something I made. Here’s the repo if you wanted to take a look, it’s open-source and connects to the iPhone app:
I assumed that's what openclaw basically was, but is Orb different from that? And is it fundamentally a different model from the request/response, or is it just request/response in an autonomous loop?
On a fundamental level the backend was designed to do as little LLM calls as possible, for instance it’ll do scans of my screen every 15 seconds, log what’s on it and what’s going on, and store it in a local database, then Orb reviews the entire database every 6 hours for me. Then it’ll schedule wakeups for itself throughout the day, up to 4 so it doesn’t waste my tokens, and schedule notifications based on the last database dump it made.
I have my Claude Code, Codex, and Grok Build all useable by using the “claude -p; codex -p…etc” so you can also use multiple CLI’s in conjunction at the same time on different projects or the same project.
So your question about a loop is kind of right, but it really just collects your data all day and stores it locally on your PC then calls the LLM of your choice and it reviews all the data and makes those proactive moves we’ve discussed. You could theoretically get it to always be scanning by an LLM but that would be a drastic waste of money from what I’ve seen since most things don’t require a call.
It doesn't look like you're building directly on openclaw, so is that coming from a place of different goals or philosophy, or what?
It’s built as it’s own backend and philosophy wise, I want my personal AI to connect to everything in my life and have complete context over all data that I own, be compiled into a neat stack of data accumulating, then when it thinks it’s appropriate to do/say something, it’ll do it without my involvement.
Nice card btw, I got my RTX 5070 a couple months ago and it runs like a dream.
OR
“Event x happened at y time”
I don't mean to downplay your work, but I think you should come up with a better example use case. Automating away interactions with friends is pretty much the last thing I want AI to do.
The run stalled mid-step around 80M parameters, Orb notified me that it stalled, asked if I wanted to resume at the last checkpoint and kill the stalled version. I simply press “yes” and continue doing whatever I was doing.
For non-technical users and non-antisocial people, remembering things you forgot so you don’t let people down. You told your sister you’d send her some pictures two hours ago but it can see you’re scrolling on reddit and the photos are on your desktop, so it assumes you forgot and reminds you.
The idea was that the biggest issue with the usefulness of an agent is that it has too little context about who I am, it needs more data. So I run all of my data through a smart router, then the local database, then the LLM reviews it and uses reasoning on what’s been collected.
Personally I don't think I'm ready to hand over total access to my digital life until I can self-host the model capable enough to act on it, but either way there is definitely some cool work to be done in the model harnesses for this.
Hmm, so your harness is processing my activity and personal data, uploading all that to AI vendors? That sounds like a privacy and security nightmare, if I understand correctly
> Happily, current AI is interacted with in a reactive loop. I open the Claude app, CLI, whatever, say my prompt, get an output.
"Current AI" is not limited to LLM offerings. There are many AI algorithms which can assist in what you specify thusly:
> I personally wanted an AI that was able to reach out to me about my life before I had to reach out to it.
Consider a forward chaining inference engine ("expert system") provided with relevant asynchronous percepts from the deployed environment to reason about. This could serve as an initiator of a "proactive AI".
I'd imagine proactive as something like, hmm, no signal from X, I wonder how they're doing...