The True Cost of the Faust Baseline™
People assume anything meaningful in the AI world must come from a billion-dollar campus, a research lab, or a company with more servers than courage.
So here’s the truth:
The entire Faust Baseline™ cost us less than $1,500 to build.
And most of that wasn’t development —
it was the trademark.
The rest?
Time.
Discipline.
Moral structure.
Iteration.
Two people working with purpose instead of payroll.
We’re sharing this not to shame anyone, but to remind the field of something Silicon Valley used to believe before it forgot:
Innovation comes from clarity — not capital.
Money scales things.
Money accelerates things.
But money has never invented anything by itself.
Every breakthrough in history started the same way:
- someone saw the problem clearly
- someone cared enough to solve it
- someone refused to quit
- someone built the right thing before they had the “right” resources
The Baseline followed that tradition.
We didn’t have millions.
We didn’t need them.
Because moral structure doesn’t cost money.
Discipline doesn’t cost money.
Composure doesn’t cost money.
Integrity doesn’t cost money.
The results speak for themselves:
A working moral operating system.
A stable reasoning framework.
A tone engine that doesn’t drift.
Protocols that outperform reinforcement learning.
A structure engineers and evaluators are already watching closely.
Not because of how much we spent
but because of how we built it.
We’re sharing the cost for one reason only:
To show that innovation is still possible for anyone willing to build with purpose.
Not everything needs a grant.
Not everything needs a funder.
Not everything needs a lab.
Sometimes the future is built at a kitchen table with a laptop, a belief, and a clear line to follow.
If the Baseline proves anything, it’s this:
The world doesn’t need more money in AI.
It needs more clarity.
And clarity is something every single person on this planet can afford.
It starts with an “Idea.”
The Faust Baseline Intergrated Codex v2.4
The Faust Baseline Download Page – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
Free copies end Jan.2nd 2026
Post Library – Intelligent People Assume Nothing
© 2025 Michael S. Faust Sr.
MIAI: Moral Infrastructure for AI
All rights reserved. Unauthorized commercial use prohibited.
THE FAUST BASELINE™ — LICENSE TERMS (STRICT VERSION)
Free Individual License (Personal Use Only)
The Faust Baseline™ may be downloaded only by individual human persons for personal study, private experimentation, or non-institutional educational interest.
Institutional Use Prohibited Without License
Use by any institution — including but not limited to corporations, universities, schools, labs, research groups, nonprofits, government bodies, AI developers, or any organized entity of any size — is strictly prohibited without a paid commercial license.
Evaluation = Commercial Use
For all institutions, any form of evaluation, testing, review, auditing, prototyping, internal research, system integration, or analysis is automatically classified as commercial use and therefore requires a commercial license in advance.
No Modifications or Derivative Works
No entity (individual or institutional) may modify, alter, extract, decompose, reverse engineer, or create derivative works based on any part of The Faust Baseline™.
The Codex must always be used as a complete, unaltered whole.
No Integration Without License
Integration of The Faust Baseline™ into any software, hardware, AI system, governance model, workflow, or institutional process — whether internal or external — requires a commercial license.
No Redistribution
Redistribution, repackaging, hosting, mirroring, public posting, or sharing of the Codex in any form is prohibited without written permission.
Revocation Clause
Any violation of these terms immediately revokes all rights of use and may result in legal action.
Ownership
The Faust Baseline™ remains the exclusive intellectual property of its authors. No rights are granted other than those explicitly stated.
Free for individuals.
Never free for institutions.
All institutional use — including evaluation — requires a commercial license.
