Open-source personal AI · v0.1 released
Install and go. A self-improving, always-growing, open-source personal AI that learns with you — on your machine, in your private GitHub repo, owned entirely by you.
The difference
What you get the moment you install
Any open-weight model, any device with the hardware. No cloud required. No API keys. No data leaves your machine. API keys supported as a first-class option — the brain stays yours either way.
Every session, your AI commits what it learned to a private repo on your GitHub. Versioned, portable, yours forever. Clone it to a new machine — your AI picks up exactly where it left off.
Skills refine through use. Memory persists. A model of who you are builds up over weeks and months. Like a child growing into an adult — except it starts as the adult, and becomes your adult.
OpenAI retires a model? Cerbral doesn't care. Anthropic changes pricing? Cerbral doesn't care. The whole industry collapses tomorrow? Your AI still runs — it's just files on your machine.
AI agents pile up session transcripts, sandboxes, caches. cerbral prune keeps local storage lean — deletes ephemeral bloat only after the important stuff is safely mirrored to your brain repo.
An always-current INDEX.md summarizes everything in your full Cerbral. Even if local content gets pruned, your AI knows what's in the repo and fetches it on demand. Nothing is ever lost.
How it works
Cerbral separates reasoning from knowledge. A small local model does the thinking. Your knowledge, skills, and memories — the things that make an AI yours — live in a Git repo you own. The repo grows; the model stays small. Intelligence is orchestrated, not stored.
┌──────────────┐ ┌──────────────┐ ┌────────────────────┐
│ Local LLM │◄─────►│ Hermes │◄─────►│ Your private │
│ (Ollama / │ │ Agent │ │ cerbral-brain │
│ llama.cpp / │ │ (skills, │ │ repo on GitHub │
│ API key) │ │ memory, │ │ (skills, memory, │
└──────────────┘ │ MCP tools) │ │ knowledge, SOUL, │
└──────────────┘ │ INDEX.md) │
│ └────────────────────┘
▼ ▲
┌──────────────┐ │
│ cerbral │─────────────────┘
│ mirror + │ auto-sync every session
│ index + │ + hourly safety net
│ prune │
└──────────────┘What Cerbral is — and isn't
Cerbral wins on the things AI is most often actually for: your projects, your writing, your code, your research, your ongoing work. On those, a system that knows you beats a system that knows everyone.
It is not trying to out-reason a frontier cloud model on a novel problem outside your world. If you need a research-grade reasoning engine for something Cerbral has no context for, reach for GPT or Claude. Cerbral is built for the 80–90% of everyday AI tasks that are about your world — and it beats them there.
Why now
The AI industry is racing to lock you in. Subscriptions stack up — ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, Copilot, Gemini. Every conversation is training data they own and you don't. When a company pivots, raises prices, retires a model, or gets acquired, you have no recourse. Your "AI" was never yours.
Cerbral inverts that. A local model, an open ecosystem, a personal knowledge base you own. No account. No permission. No one in the middle. Your brain stays yours — even if this project itself disappears tomorrow, your AI still runs.
Your brain. Your repo. Your machine. Forever.