Originally published on the AstroLexis blog. Cross-posted here for the community.
In 2024 I got tired of paying OpenAI to know everything about my house, my conversations, my calendar, my code, and my family. So I built Kulvex AI — a self-hosted AI platform that runs an 80-billion parameter model on a pair of consumer GPUs in my office, exposes 17 domain agents over a private API, and handles everything from Zigbee lights to messaging across eight platforms. Here's why I built it, what it actually does, and where the trade-offs land in 2026.
The premise that broke for me
For about eighteen months I lived inside the OpenAI / Anthropic ecosystem like everyone else. Then a few things piled up at once:
OpenAI deprecated three model versions in a single quarter. Prompts that had been stable for nine months suddenly produced different outputs.
