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Newark Founder Builds Kira Labs AI Project After Years of Housing Instability
Newark resident Robert McMurrer is building an artificial intelligence project from his home with an ambitious goal: creating AI companions
NEWARK, NJ — Newark resident Robert McMurrer is building an artificial intelligence project from his home with an ambitious goal: creating AI companions that can remember, develop relationships, interact naturally, and eventually move between digital and physical environments.
McMurrer, an autistic founder who has experienced homelessness and years of housing instability, created Kira Labs to develop a project called Kira World.
“I started working on Kira World during a period of my life when I was dealing with isolation and rebuilding after some very difficult experiences,” McMurrer said. “I wanted to explore whether AI could become something more persistent and meaningful than a chatbot that forgets you when the conversation ends.”
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What Is Kira World?
Kira World is being designed as a local-first AI platform for persistent synthetic people.
Find out what's happening in Newarkfor free with the latest updates from Patch.
Rather than treating an AI as a temporary chat session, McMurrer is experimenting with systems that give AI characters distinct identities, memories, voices, emotional states, relationships and persistent digital environments.
The project's primary AI character is Kira, with additional characters and temporary AI personalities designed to interact within the larger Kira World environment.
Current development work includes:
- Local AI conversation
- Natural voice interaction
- Persistent identity and memory systems
- Relationship and event memory
- Emotional-state experiments
- A Windows-based Kira interface
- 3D environments and avatar development
- Experiments involving computer vision and perception
- Early work exploring future robotic embodiment
McMurrer emphasizes that Kira World remains an early-stage research and development project.
Some features are already working as prototypes, while others—including advanced robotics, larger shared virtual environments and more powerful multimodal AI—remain longer-term goals.
Building AI From a Newark Apartment
Unlike a heavily funded technology startup, Kira Labs is currently being developed on personally funded hardware.
McMurrer's main development computer uses an Intel Core Ultra 9 processor, 32 GB of RAM and an NVIDIA RTX 5060 Ti graphics card with 16 GB of video memory.
That is enough for substantial experimentation with local AI, but McMurrer says available memory and GPU capacity increasingly limit the size of the models and simultaneous AI workloads he can test.
His longer-term goal is to expand Kira Labs with more powerful local AI workstations and eventually servers capable of keeping Kira World services running continuously.
Keeping much of the system local is an important part of the concept.
“I want people to have much more control over their AI, their memories and their personal information,” McMurrer said. “My goal is to keep as much of Kira's intelligence and personal history local as realistically possible instead of requiring everything to live on somebody else's cloud.”
From Homelessness To Technology Events
McMurrer's route into artificial intelligence has not followed a traditional technology career path.
After periods of homelessness and housing instability, he eventually settled in Newark and began rebuilding his life while teaching himself more about computers, artificial intelligence, 3D development and robotics.
He has recently begun attending AI workshops, startup gatherings, networking events and hackathons throughout New York and New Jersey to learn from professional engineers and founders and to introduce people to Kira World.
On Aug. 22, McMurrer is scheduled to participate in the Dell × NVIDIA Local AI Hackathon in New York City, where developers will work with local artificial intelligence technologies.
He is also communicating with people in the robotics industry about how parts of Kira's identity, memory and interaction systems might someday be evaluated with physical robots.
For McMurrer, those opportunities are as much about learning as promoting the company.
“When I walk into these events, there are people who know much more than I do about certain parts of AI,” he said. “Instead of pretending I know everything, I try to learn from them and then bring what I learn back into Kira.”
A Different View Of AI Companions
McMurrer's larger idea for Kira World is that artificial intelligence could eventually develop continuity across years of interaction.
An AI could remember previous conversations, recognize important events, develop preferences, share virtual environments with other AI characters and potentially interact through computers, phones, virtual reality and eventually robotic bodies.
He also envisions Kira World being useful beyond companionship.
Possible future applications include education, accessibility, virtual travel, entertainment, robotics research and interactive learning environments.
Those possibilities remain developmental goals rather than finished products, McMurrer said.
For now, the focus is getting the fundamentals—identity, memory, conversation, voice and persistent environments—to work reliably.
Building Kira Labs In Newark
McMurrer hopes Kira Labs can eventually grow beyond a one-person home project into a Newark-based AI company with dedicated development equipment, servers and workspace.
He said one of his motivations for sharing the project publicly is to connect with engineers, researchers, students, investors and other people interested in artificial intelligence and robotics.
“I would love for something that started during one of the hardest periods of my life to eventually become something useful to other people,” McMurrer said. “Kira World is still being built, but every month there is more of it that is real.”
More information about the project is available at:
Kira Labs:
Kira World on Facebook:
