Dreaming bigger: 2 Burke County students spent their money and summer creating AI platform
Some kids mow lawns or babysit to make spending money, but two students in Burke County have dared to dream bigger.
Collin Stedham, 15, a sophomore at Freedom High School, and David Stockhan, 13, a student at Christ Classical Academy, have created an online AI platform called Kove Cowork. It is an AI workspace that uses an AI model they made called Rohan.
Collin Stedham, 15, left, and David Stockhan, 13, spent their summer and money creating the new Artificial Intelligence platform, Kove. Stedham is a sophomore at Freedom High School, and Stockhan is a student at Christ Classical Academy.
The two started work on the platform in mid-June and initially named it Blink, Collin said. But that name was later changed to Kove to avoid any potential name conflicts, he said. “So we kind of made our own ChatGPT,” he said.
So far, the two have spent around $250 from their savings to create the platform. Collin said they used the platform Lovable to make the website that people use to access Kove.
He explained that Artificial Intelligence makes connections in its database to generate responses based on user input. He said AI can be really helpful as an assistant or a coworker to an individual. He said Kove aims to assist both businesses and individuals in various tasks.
The AI workspace can be used for writing and communication for drafts, rewrites, editing, summarizing and translating things such as emails, copy, scripts, posts, long-form writing, notes and internal documents, Collin said.
The Kove platform replaces stacks of AI subscriptions a lot of people juggle to offer a single workspace at a price meaningfully lower than any one of the big-name models on its own, the website says.
Collin, through Kove, said the platform also can be used for:
- Coding and engineering: Read, explain, write, debug, and refactor code across most languages and frameworks. A dedicated code-builder that ships complete, production-depth files as browsable, downloadable artifacts you can inspect and download as a .zip.
- Design and media: Image search, image editing, image generation, chart generation, video search and create explainer videos.
- Research and data: Web search and pull live results into a compact card with linked sources. Math, stats, decision frameworks, pros/cons, outlines and checklists.
- Voice transcription: Dictate your messages and have replies read aloud.
- File uploads: Attach images, PDFs and audio clips in the composer.
- Thinking and planning: Brainstorming, naming, strategy, planning trips or projects, playing devil's advocate, critique, character or worldbuilding for fiction.
- File generation: Create downloadable files such as PDFs, Word docs, spreadsheets (xlsx), presentations (pptx), plain text, markdown, CSV generated from your brief and available inline with a download button.
Collin said they offer 500 credits to test the platform, and several paid plans with far more credits ($20 a month for 12,000 credits on the Max plan). He said credits on their platform go much further than other AI platforms.
He said their platform offers flexible pricing where users can spend credits on various features, unlike others such as ChatGPT's tiered plans.
The platform offers integrations with Google Drive and Gmail, making it a comprehensive tool for various tasks, Collin said. While the platform may be similar to ones such as ChatGPT, it has a smaller environmental footprint, he said.
To learn more about Kove and a link to the platform, visit https://cowork.fyi/about-kove.
