Little Pines Studio
Build with us.
Little Pines Studio is a small workshop making one careful thing, slowly, in public. The target retail debut is holiday 2027. The research, the curriculum, and the safety work begin now. If you see yourself in one of the roles below, I’d love to hear from you.
— Daria Zhao, Founder
The seven invitations
For the engineer in edge AI, embedded systems, or hardware
The hardest design problem in this product is the one nobody sees.
We are running a frontier small model on-device, on a sealed hardware pod, inside a nine-inch plush. Gemma 4 on Synaptics Astra-class silicon. Whisper for child-voice STT. A physical microphone kill-switch at the circuit level. No cloud, ever. The hardest problems are child-voice recognition, sub-second latency on a quantized model, and the thermal and power envelope inside a toy a four-year-old sleeps with.
If you’ve shipped something that had to be invisible, efficient, and right — and you want to do that again for something that matters — I’d like to find a time to talk. Equity-and-mission terms. Part-time or full-time. Based anywhere.
Eight audiences, one workshop.
If none of the seven above quite fit but you still want to be near the project as a pilot family, a craft contributor, or a parent who wants to hear how it’s going: the early access list is the right door.
Join the early access list