15 comments

  • nineteen999 1 hour ago
    This couldn't be more perfectly timed .. I have an Unreal Engine game with both VT100 terminals (for running coding agents) and Z80 emulators, and a serial bridge that allows coding agents to program the CP/M machines:

    https://i.imgur.com/6TRe1NE.png

    Thank you for posting! It's unbelievable how someone sometimes just drops something that fits right into what you're doing. However bizarre it seems.

    • sixtyj 5 minutes ago
      Connections: Alternative History of Technology by James Burke documents these "coincidences".
    • quesomaster9000 24 minutes ago
      Oh dear, it seems we've... somehow been psychically linked...

      I developed a browser-based CP/M emulator & IDE: https://lockboot.github.io/desktop/

      I was going to post that instead, but wanted a 'cool demo' instead, and fell down the rabbit hole.

  • vatary 5 minutes ago
    It's pretty obvious this is just a stress test for compressing and running LLMs. It doesn't have much practical use right now, but it shows us that IoT devices are gonna have built-in LLMs really soon. It's a huge leap in intelligence—kind of like the jump from apes to humans. That is seriously cool.
  • anonzzzies 10 minutes ago
    Luckily I have a very large amount of MSX computers, zx, amstrad cpc etc and even one multiprocessor z80 cp/m machine for the real power. Wonder how gnarly this is going to perform with bankswitching though. Probably not good.
  • magicalhippo 19 minutes ago
    As far as I know, the last layer is very quantization-sensitive, and is typically not quantized, or quantized lightly.

    Have you experimented with having it less quantized, and evaluated the quality drop?

    Regardless, very cool project.

  • vedmakk 1 hour ago
    If one would train an actual secret (e.g. a passphrase) into such a model, that a user would need to guess by asking the right questions. Could this secret be easily reverse engineered / inferred by having access to models weights - or would it be safe to assume that one could only get to the secret by asking the right questions?
    • Kiboneu 41 minutes ago
      I don’t know, but your question reminds me of this paper which seems to address it on a lower level: https://arxiv.org/abs/2204.06974

      “Planting Undetectable Backdoors in Machine Learning Models”

      “ … On the surface, such a backdoored classifier behaves normally, but in reality, the learner maintains a mechanism for changing the classification of any input, with only a slight perturbation. Importantly, without the appropriate "backdoor key", the mechanism is hidden and cannot be detected by any computationally-bounded observer. We demonstrate two frameworks for planting undetectable backdoors, with incomparable guarantees. …”

    • ronsor 40 minutes ago
      > this secret be easily reverse engineered / inferred by having access to models weights

      It could with a network this small. More generally this falls under "interpretability."

  • roygbiv2 1 hour ago
    Awesome. I've just designed and built my own z80 computer, though right now it has 32kb ROM and 32kb RAM. This will definitely change on the next revision so I'll be sure to try it out.
    • wewewedxfgdf 58 minutes ago
      RAM is very expensive right now.
      • tgv 39 minutes ago
        We're talking kilobytes, not gigabytes. And it isn't DDR5 either.
  • a_t48 49 minutes ago
    Nice - that will fit on a Gameboy cartridge, though bank switching might make it super terrible to run. Each bank is only 16k. You can have a bunch of them, but you can only access one bank at a time (well, technically two - bank 0 is IIRC always accessible).
  • Zee2 2 hours ago
    This is super cool. Would love to see a Z80 simulator set up with these examples to play with!
  • pdyc 1 hour ago
    interesting, i am wondering how far can it go if we remove some of these limitations but try to solve some extremely specific problem like generating regex based on user input? i know small models(270M range) can do that but can it be done in say < 10MB range?
    • Waterluvian 26 minutes ago
      Generate an LLM that is designed to solve one extremely specific problem: answering the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything.

      Even with modern supercomputing the computation would be outpaced by the heat death of the universe, so token output must be limited to a single integer.

  • dirkt 1 hour ago
    Eliza's granddaughter.
  • Dwedit 1 hour ago
    In before AI companies buy up all the Z80s and raise the prices to new heights.
  • Zardoz84 18 minutes ago
    Meanwhile, Eliza was ported to BASIC and was run on many home computers in the 80s.
  • jasonjmcghee 1 hour ago
    For future projects and/or for this project, there are many LLMs available more than good enough to generate that kind of synthetic data (20 Qs) with permissive terms of use. (So you don’t need to stress about breaking TOS / C&D etc)
  • alfiedotwtf 1 hour ago
    An LLM in a .com file? Haha made my day
    • teaearlgraycold 37 minutes ago
      SLM
      • quesomaster9000 33 minutes ago
        All the 'Small' language models and the 'TinyML' scene in general tend to bottom out at a million parameters, hence I though 'micro' is more apt at ~150k params.
  • codetiger 1 hour ago
    Imagine, this working on a Gameboy, in those days. Would've sounded like magic
    • Sharlin 1 hour ago
      I don’t think this could beat an ELIZA-style bot in how magical it feels, given the extreme terseness of its replies.
    • lodovic 1 hour ago
      I love these thought experiments. Looking at the code size, it would have been possible for someone to come up with this back in the days, similar to the idea of a million monkeys on a typewriter eventually producing Shakespeare.
    • alfiedotwtf 1 hour ago
      And would have lasted 3 minutes.

      Speaking of - I remember my first digital camera (Fujitsu 1Mb resolution using SmartMedia)… it used so much power that you could take 20-30 photos and then needed to replace all 4 batteries lol