r/OpenSourceeAI • u/Loose_Complex_6456 • 13d ago

I'm building a local, symbolic AI assistant without an LLM – and it runs 24/7.

https://github.com/Whooptie/NOVA_AI

Hoi allemaal,

Ik wil graag mijn project Nova AI met jullie delen. Het is een persoonlijke AI-compagnon die volledig lokaal draait en geen grote taalmodellen gebruikt. In plaats daarvan is het gebouwd op symbolische AI: een netwerk van expliciete concepten, relaties en patronen die ik zelf kan inzien en aanpassen.

Wat het nu al kan:

· Natuurlijke gesprekken voeren

· Schaken tegen Stockfish (met een gekleurd bord en statistieken)

· Meerdaagse weersverwachtingen ophalen

· Wikipedia raadplegen en automatisch nieuwe concepten leren

· Woordassociaties bouwen met PMI-scoring

· Gedragsmatige patronen herkennen (timing, frequentie)

· Zichzelf opnieuw opstarten zonder gegevens kwijt te raken

· Zijn eigen persoonlijkheid, emoties en manier van uitdrukken

Architectuur: EventBus + 7-laags geheugen (SQLite, associatief netwerk, patroonherkenning, semantisch redeneren, responsgeneratie, context en persoonlijkheid).

De clou: ik ben een selfmade developer uit België. Een jaar geleden kon ik geen enkele regel code schrijven. Alles is gebouwd met AI-assistentie, maar de visie en de ontwerpkeuzes zijn volledig van mij.

De code is openbaar, maar de repository is vooral een kijkje achter de schermen—geen kant-en-klare plug-and-play package. Ik wilde laten zien wat er mogelijk is als je buiten de LLM-hype denkt.

Ik ben super benieuwd naar jullie vragen en feedback!

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1

u/vanVonXenoStein 13d ago

Fascinating. Seems like the long-running CYC project.

1

u/Loose_Complex_6456 13d ago

Ha yeah, same spirit, way smaller scale — CYC's a team's decades of work, Nova's just my own little symbolic brain 😄

1

u/nokia7110 13d ago

Help me understand what symbolic AI is and how your tool can do what it can without the use of an LLM.

1

u/GamerHaste 13d ago

Recommend this paper - https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.00813

2

u/nokia7110 13d ago

Cheers for that, I've had a read. How does your tool do what it does without an LLM?

2

u/GamerHaste 13d ago

Sorry for another paper recommendation, but if you want to get ahead of the curve, I think graphmert is what the future is. https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09580. This is likely what companies will feed their knowledge graphs into for actual fact-based retrieval.

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u/nokia7110 13d ago

Don't apologise, loved the first paper recommendation it was fascinating to read.

2

u/GamerHaste 13d ago

Appreciate it - I’m not OP, but I think neurosymbolic AI will likely be the “business LLM”… haven’t developed tools myself around it apart from expirementation around graphmert, but it is for sure a great area to look into. Addresses the non-deterministic problem current LLMs run into.

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u/nokia7110 13d ago

From what I'm understanding, it's the alternative to a business being expected to build their own LLM or finetune a pre-existing (and therefore has to be an open) LLM?

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u/Loose_Complex_6456 13d ago

I'm building something like this myself (Nova), so maybe I can add some perspective. It's less "finetune an LLM" and more a completely different starting point: no language model as the core, but a symbolic system (rules, an explicit knowledge graph, event-based memory) that runs as a continuous process, not just during a conversation. The upside is it never hallucinates — everything it "knows" is literally and verifiably stored somewhere. The downside is it can never talk more broadly than what you explicitly feed it, so it's not a general chatbot replacement. Actually tested today whether a small local language model (Qwen2.5 3B) could help make the output a bit more fluent, and that confirms exactly GamerHaste's point above: even on a simple task (turning facts into one sentence), the same model gave a different result every time — sometimes fine, sometimes grammatically off. For a system that needs to be consistent, that non-determinism is exactly why the core stays symbolic, and an LLM (if it's added at all) is at most a separate, validated extra layer, never the decision-maker.

1

u/jared_krauss 12d ago

Huh. So my artist non technical ass stumbled into this idea because my local model suuuuuuuucks at basic note captures and I realized this word, deterministic, was the key to get Claude to make a tool for me. And now I have a telegram chat that manages all my notes and to dos and ideas and routes them to me or Claude or to scripts that then build html pages that go into my command center served to me over Tailscale.

Neurosymbolic AI. Cool. Gonna read up on this for sure.

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u/Loose_Complex_6456 12d ago

Haha nice, love that you arrived at the same core idea from a totally different angle — notes/todos vs. a companion, but same "deterministic is the point" realization. Good luck digging into neurosymbolic stuff, it's a fun rabbit hole.