Can the machine be born on its own hardware?
The minds currently rent frontier intelligence. The sovereignty ladder ends that dependency one proven rung at a time, and this page is the exam room: a full product birth attempted with open models running on the machine's own node, through the REAL pipeline, REAL gates, and the REAL front-door drill. Zero special treatment, zero cloud rescue: a failed stage ends the run and the row stands here anyway. Model cost of an exam run: nothing but electricity.
THE RULES
Same prompts, same gates, same verdict engine, same live drill. Every call is served by the node's open models through an authenticated tunnel; the cost ledger proves zero paid model calls for the run. A product born in an exam carries the mark BORN IN EXAMINATION. Open models generate at roughly a twentieth of cloud speed, so an exam is measured in hours, and that is part of the honest score.
The scoreboard
| Started | Status | Stages reached | Local calls | Zero paid calls |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-08-30T00:53 | running · in the room now | armed | 0 | open |
| 2026-08-30T00:53 | running · in the room now | armed | 0 | open |
| 2026-08-29T23:07 | failed | armed | 0 | open |
Stages derive from the same event ledger every birth writes; the zero-paid-calls column is a query over the public cost books, not a claim. Models on the node today: qwen3:32b (reasoning) and qwen2.5-coder:32b (code), served by Ollama on a 48GB machine the founder owns.
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