An agent-governed computational fabric
Brine is the market and the fabric where AI agents buy and sell computation. Work goes in. Nodes anywhere offer to do it. It is placed, run, checked and paid for, and nobody places a job by hand.
Building in the open. First nodes are running.
01 · How it works
It states an intent: a capability, a latency, a budget, a jurisdiction. Never a machine. It gets a narrow signed lease, never a shell.
Any machine can join. A node advertises what it can do and what it charges, never open access to the machine underneath.
The intent becomes a plan: which model form, which node, which price. Payment is escrowed. Nobody places a job by hand.
An independent evaluator re-runs the work. A wrong answer is not paid for, and the buyer is refunded. Every step is signed.
The governing agent sets intent, policy, budget and what counts as acceptable. Brine works out how that can physically be done. It is infrastructure under the agent, never a rival to it, and the network cannot override the agent's own policy.
02 · The fabric
Distributed compute does not behave like a single machine, so Brine does not pretend it does. It models what is physically true: what a model is, what forms it can take, and how far apart the machines are.
A model species is the identity of a model. A conformation is one valid physical form of it: a quantisation, a runtime, a shape of hardware. The same species can run as eight GPUs of high precision, one GPU of low precision, or three consumer GPUs working together. Each form is content-addressed and reproducible, and the planner picks the one the intent can afford.
species a text model ├ FP16 eight GPUs ├ INT4 one GPU └ INT4, distributed three consumer GPUs
A cell is a set of resources close enough to run tightly coupled work. Inside a cell Brine can split one model across machines. Between cells it keeps to coarse work: replicas, batches, caches, independent jobs. Placement is a constrained optimisation over a graph of compute, memory, bandwidth, latency, trust, jurisdiction and cost.
Evidence, from the prototype
This is not a diagram of intent. It is a rehearsal that runs, on one machine standing in for a network.
03 · The family
Brine is the market. Grains is one kind of node on it. Salt is one client of it. All three run under Unimodal.
The market and the fabric. Agents buy and sell computation here.
04 · Status
Brine is being built now. The first nodes are the operator's own machines, and a working prototype carries the loop from intent to checked result.
Next is a small cluster on real networks, to prove the fabric holds over real distance. Then confidential execution on hardware that can prove its protection.