The Hot Air Factory is a mini computer that turns hidden AI energy costs into a physical reality

Almost anyone born before the 2000s can remember desktop PC towers churning underneath their desk, great hunks of computer sounding as if they were about to go mach 10 and fly out of your bedroom window. Today, energy is silent – too silent. The London based creative company oio design “products and tools for a less boring future” – turning emerging technologies into approachable, everyday, sustainable realities – not just for humans, but for tech too. Their latest computer is a tiny one, a whimsical little device called The Hot Air Factory.

“The Hot Air Factory is a small, domestic AI that reveals the hidden energy cost behind every prompt,” says oio co-founder Matteo Loglio. “You can use it just like you would use any other AI service, like ChatGPT, with the difference that you can always tell how much energy each prompt is using.” Most of us use AI every day (even if we don’t realise it), and although we know it has an energy cost, we don’t actually know how much it actually consumes – we have nothing to compare it to on a pedestrian level. In “very human-readable terms”, The Hot Air Factory uses cute comparisons such as “the cost of brewing a cup of tea” or “watching Netflix for 5 minutes” in order to quantify the invisible ways we always use energy – this way, you feel the cost.

Equipped with a cartoonishly small pinwheel, air is pushed out of the top of the mini factory, creating a sense of lo-fi acknowledgement of energy costs that is funny as it is politically urgent. “It works just like all the cloud AI services, with the difference that The Hot Air Factory never connects to the cloud – everything stays there in your living room. All the AI computation happens there,” says Matteo.

Oio’s creative technologist Marta Fioravanti coded the AI functionalities and Bjørn Karmann designed the physical box and pinwheel, whilst visual designer Léane Beauquis was responsible for all the branding and UI design, together with the 3D renders and animations. It took a few weeks of full immersion from the team to put together the final metaphor of the piece, first going through ideas like a power grid simulator or a village of NPC peasants literally farming energy for AI overlords, but in the end, the pinwheel was the winner. The factory as it is today is a clean, light and 3D printable design that is simultaneously utopian in its ‘frutiger aero’, alternative furniture inspired appearance – and dystopian in its implications.

The Hot Air Factory is ornamental and pretty, which is part of the point. Oio strive to make technology more understandable through playfulness and simple interactions – it’s accessible to young and old alike, who may not fully grasp the physical reality of invisible costs. Under the hood, it’s a technically impressive and complicated machine, running open-source large language models on a GPU, but on the outside, the factory uses intelligent and straightforward visual language to get the point across. “We all use AI these days, and it’s such a divisive topic,” says Matteo. “What we’re doing is not necessarily saying this is good or bad, but imagining a different way of using it, one that is not scary or suspicious, where AI is not hidden in a remote server room on the other side of the world owned by who knows who, but it’s actually a cute little box in your living room.”