'Intern 2' offers an isolated environment and cloudy inference to automate your world
Autonomous.ai, an eleven-year-old manufacturer of techno-toys, high-end workstations, and office furniture, has released a small machine called Intern 2 for running AI agents like Hermes or OpenClaw.
The company's first Intern device shipped in March, around the time OpenClaw became popular.
"People use them for various tasks in a creative way," said Dee Tran, head of AI hardware. "The most common use cases are repetitive cronjobs, loops, and scheduled tasks."
Priced at $299, the 4.7-inch pyramid-shaped machine looks more ornamental than computational.
We're not sure exactly what's inside because the company's product listing says it includes an OrangePi board, but its press release says it can also include a Raspberry Pi 4 or 5. Autonomous.ai has not responded to several requests for clarification. We'll update the story if they respond.
What we do know is that the company sells the devices preconfigured with Hermes or OpenClaw, or will install an agent of your choice for an extra $50. There's also a mic, a speaker, and support for USB-C, Wi-Fi 5, and Bluetooth 5 - all sitting under an illuminated capstone.
The device doesn't run a local model. Instead, it accesses cloud-based inference and comes with an allowance of ten million tokens per day from Autonomous' own gateway.
"We have an internal router that fuses different models and decides in real time which model to use for each task," explained Tran.
That service means Tran sees the device as a less scary way to run an AI agent than using local models.
"Buying a second Mac just for background tasks is overkill, but letting an AI agent loose on your main laptop feels pretty sketchy," he told The Register.
It's also possible to point Intern 2 at a local model on separate hardware running an OpenAI-compatible server. The operating system (Autonomous-os) is open source under Apache 2.0, except for the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) under GPL-3.0, so further modification is possible.
If you want to run local models at speed, Autonomous.ai has you covered. The company also sells computers packing high-end GeForce GPUs at prices that range from $26,100 to $93,900.
Having dedicated hardware to run AI resolves some of the issues around enabling agents to operate without supervision. So if you wanted to entrust an AI agent to deal with email, scheduling, GitHub interaction, social media post automation, research, or some similarly hands-off task, Intern 2 could mean you can do so with less concern about unrequested file deletion.
Whether anyone wants to receive your agent's automated messages is another issue worth considering.
"For now, I don't think auto-sending (slop haha) emails works," Tran said. "But we've seen AI improve so much in many different areas. I barely write code any more. AI writes all of my code and code is a really complex form of language. AI even designs our products now."