Emmaus High graduate James Harada’s hobbies have earned him Farm Show baking ribbons, but now he’s after a much bigger prize: a corporate contract that would bring his patent-pending AI companion to the world stage.
James, 18, and brother Charles, 16, have modified open source AI chatbots to create a model with persistent memory that could offer clients such as schools, health care agencies and banks the ability to use AI while maintaining control of its records.
“You’re giving AI real memory,” Charles Harada said.
Storing chatbot data locally, rather than relying on cloud-based storage, would make it possible for school staff to trace a concerning conversation or allow bank personnel easy access to transaction records.
“You can go backward in time and have the very first conversational message with the AI always stored there,” said Jon Harada, James and Charles’ father and coding partner.
The benefit of having protected records that are searchable is obvious to Nicole Harada, James and Charles’ mother, who works as an occupational therapist in East Penn School District.
Currently, there’s no secure method to store digital notes that would allow service providers like occupational, physical and speech therapists to share records with each other and allow teachers and administrators access.
“Privacy is huge,” Nicole Harada said, noting that the creation of a secure, shareable database of student records would be a game changer.
The Haradas’ AI model, Cassie, is available in app stores. It can run on a phone or laptop. High-powered hardware is not necessary, Jon Harada said, noting they’ve tested the model on 5-year-old computers.
The version of Cassie available in app stores is proof of concept, Jon Harada said, and the family has filed for U.S. and international patents.
A family endeavor
The Haradas formed a company, Solace AI, to manage their AI work, with Nicole acting as project manager. They’ve seen interest from a small European conglomerate and hope to eventually license the model, Jon Harada said.
The original motivation for the project came from the Harada brothers trying to solve a video game quandary: when one of their friends wasn’t available for a role-playing game, why couldn’t the computer learn to copy their game style?
Jon Harada said he was just “trying to be a good dad and answer questions” and he quickly discovered that the industry-standard cloud-based models didn’t have the persistent memory necessary to solve the problem the brothers posed.
Jon is a self-taught coder. James and Charles started coding through an elementary-age program at the local library and have continued their education through online tools like code.org, YouTube and GitHub.
Their collaboration has at times taken over the family kitchen.
“We’ve sat around the table having poor food choices while my wife grumbled: not too much takeout and Chex Mix,” Jon Harada said.
The brothers’ history of tackling projects together can also be seen in the family’s backyard, where the koi pond they dug flashes with orange and white fish.
Charles would like to pursue a career in civil engineering, while James said he’s interested in both American history and electrical engineering. They both see their AI work as a side project they hope to offload to a company that can commercialize it.
Nicole Harada said she always thought her boys would turn out to be the Wright brothers, saying James would be the one to create something and Charles would be the one to drive it off a cliff.
Charles, now a junior at Emmaus High, did have pragmatic advice to offer future inventors, saying, “Sleep is important — maintain a proper sleep schedule.”
James, who graduated from Emmaus High in the spring and is now studying at Lehigh Carbon Community College, said inventing is a learning process.
“If you’re going to fail, fail fast and make sure you learn from your mistakes,” he said.
The next step for the brothers’ collaboration will be the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges Eastern Region Conference at Aradia University, where they are scheduled to present Oct. 24.
“Two important traits for high school students are intellectual curiosity and the ability to commit; in other words, dive-in and complete a project,” George Dimitoglou, the conference papers chair and Hood College professor, said in an email. “Both James and Charles proved with their Cassie AI model that they have exactly what it takes to explore, learn and deliver. We are happy to hear and see their work at the student paper sessions of the conference.”
