Everyone is racing to put an AI in your ear. The question nobody’s asking: where does it actually live — and who gets to keep what it hears?
Meta’s glasses. The OpenAI & Jony Ive device. The pendants. Different shapes, same architecture — your voice, your face, your day, streamed to someone else’s servers to be processed, stored, and monetized. Core inverts it.
The device is thin on purpose. The intelligence — and your data — lives in their cloud. You rent access to a copy of yourself.
The AI runs on a Guardian server you own, in your home. The earpiece is just an encrypted radio to it — over its own LTE, no phone, no cloud. A closed loop you control.
Core feeds one growing memory we call the Connectome — people, places, projects, all wired together on your own server. Watch it find its own shape.
Each node is a thing Core remembers. The Presence node routes the whole graph — on hardware you own.
This isn’t a pitch for a thing that might exist. The hard parts are already on the table — and one of them is running right now.
Three angles from the finished behind-the-ear housing — straight out of the Fusion 360 CAD.
Behind-the-ear CAD complete in Fusion 360 — LTE radio, 2MP camera with privacy shutter, and six sensor types (PPG/SpO2, IR temp, GSR, IMU, environmental gas) laid out in the housing.
Component-level bill of materials priced at volume — roughly seventy-eight to one hundred twenty dollars a unit — against a two hundred forty-nine dollar target retail. The model holds.
Presence — the local-first AI that would live on the Guardian server — is working software today, driving a real assistant by voice. The earpiece is the body for a brain that exists.
To be clear: Core the earpiece is pre-production — design and costing complete, not yet built in silicon. What’s real and running is the software it would speak to.
Not a fundraise. Not a demo day. Just — does owning the AI in your ear matter as much as I think it does? You’ve spent a career asking who owns the platform. This is that question, for the most intimate one yet.
Start the 15 minutes