Small AI, doing one useful thing at a time.
ANI stands for Artificial Niche Intelligence: small open-weight AI run locally, each pointed at a public data source and a plain job. Tell people when the aurora is visible from their latitude. Tell them a recall covers their car. Nothing more ambitious than that.
What runs where
The engine runs on one desktop PC with an RTX 5080 graphics card. In the last seven days it made 8,660 model runs on that card (89%) with gpt-oss:20b, and sent 1,061 requests to Claude, a cloud model made by Anthropic. Those cloud calls do the jobs where the local model isn't reliable enough yet: picking photos, checking facts against sources, drafting replies for a person to approve, and pulling decisions out of news stories for FlockWatch. They run in a data center, and we count them here rather than pretend otherwise.
Most posts don't use a model at all. An earthquake post, a recall, a fire milestone or a flight restriction is built straight from the agency's data by ordinary code.
Energy
The graphics card is drawing 38 W right now. Weekly energy use appears here once a week of readings is in. That figure is the GPU only. It doesn't include the rest of the PC or the cloud requests above, which we can count but can't meter.
How a post gets checked
When a model writes or summarizes anything, a second pass checks it against the source. Every number in the post has to appear in the source, quoted evidence has to be found in the source, and any claim the source doesn't support fails the post. A failed post doesn't go out; the photo accounts build a new one instead.
The Good AI principles
Who runs it
ANI Alerts is a project of JD Media, LLC. It's a one-person operation: the machine does the watching and a person sets the rules. Corrections and ideas go through the suggestion box.