Philippine Developer Launches Hiraia, an Offline AI Science Tutor That Runs on $100 Android Phones

Luis Buenaventura, a member of the Blockchain Council of the Philippines, has developed Hiraia, an open-source AI science tutor that runs fully offline on entry-level Android phones costing around $100, supporting Tagalog, Bisaya, and English. Built on Sea AI Lab's Sailor 2 model and a continued-pretraining fork of Qwen 3.5-2B, the app includes over 40,000 science facts and 30,000 illustrations aligned with the Department of Education's MATATAG curriculum. The project received a 1 million peso research grant from the Tether Foundation and is currently in early alpha (v0.3.1), with the developer seeking academic partners for classroom pilots.

More than 60 percent of households in the Philippines lack fixed broadband, making cloud-based AI tutoring hard to reach these students; Hiraia puts the model and curriculum content into local storage, offering a replicable deployment path for low-connectivity areas. For education product builders, it demonstrates a combination of local inference on low-power hardware and peer-to-peer distribution to bypass network bottlenecks; for schools, its alignment with the MATATAG curriculum and zero data collection lower adoption barriers. The app is still in early alpha and has not entered real classroom pilots, so teaching effectiveness and long-term maintenance lack independent verification. Students in low-bandwidth areas can use AI science tutoring and offline question banks without internet, removing household broadband as a coverage constraint. Education AI products can reference its approach of local inference, peer-to-peer distribution, and pre-generated content aligned to curriculum standards to reduce reliance on cloud services and constant connectivity.