What I really want is a game where each of the NPCs has a tiny model like this, so you can actually talk to them.
Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
91–100 of 126 posts
Re: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been playing the Z80-μLM demos in your CP/M emulator. Works great! However, I have yet to guess a correct answer in GUESS.COM! I'm not sure if I'm just not asking the right questions or I'm just really bad at it!
Don't tell anybody, but you sit on it
Boris!!!
Re: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
#93This is something I've been wondering about myself. What's the "Minimally Viable LLM" that can have simple conversations. Then my next question is, how much can we push it so it can learn from looking up data externally, can we build a tiny model with an insanely larger context window? I have to assume I'm not the only one who has asked or thought of these things. Ultimately, if you can build an ultra tiny model that…
I think what's amazing to speculate is how we could have had some very basic LLMs in at least the 90s if we'd invented the tech previously. I wonder what the world would be like now if we had?
Re: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
#94Imagine, this working on a Gameboy, in those days. Would've sounded like magic
"Look, my Game Boy passes the Turing Test!"
*burns you at the stake*
Re: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
My Pentium 3 in 2005 could do chat and video calls and play chess and send silly emotes. There is no conceivable user-facing reason why in 20 years the same functionality takes 30× as many resources, only developer-facing reasons. But those are not valid reasons for a professional. If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her…
I have great doubts that you were doing simultaneous screen sharing from multiple participants with group annotation plus HD video in your group calls, all while supporting chatting that allowed you to upload and view multiple animated gifs, videos, rich formatted text, reactions, slash command and application automation integrations, all simultaneously on your Pentium 3. I would be interested to know the name of the…
You're grasping at anything to justify the unjustifiable. Not only did I do most (not all, obviously) of those things in my Pentium 3, including video and voice chat, screenshare, and silly animated gifs and rich text formatting, but also: that's beside the point. Let's compare like with like then; how much memory does it take to have a group chat with a few people and do a voice/video in MSN messenger or the original Skype, and how much does Slack or Teams take? What about UI stutter? Load time? There's absolutely no justification for a worse user experience in a 2025 computer that would be a borderline supercomputer in 2005.
Re: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
#96So it seems like with the right code (and maybe a ton of future infrastructure for training?) Eliza could have been much more capable back in the day.
The original ELIZA ran on an IBM 7094 mainframe, in the 1960s. That machine had 32K x 36-bit words, and no support for byte operations. It did support 6-bit BCD characters, packed 6 per word, but those were for string operations, and didn't support arithmetic or logical operations.
This means that a directly translated 40 KB Z80 executable might be a tight squeeze on that mainframe, because 40K > 32K, counting words, not bytes. Of course if most of that size is just 2-bit weight data then it might not be so bad.
ELIZA running on later hardware would have been a different story, with the Z80 - released in 1976 - being an example.
Re: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
#97Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If a bridge engineer claims he now needs 30× as much concrete to build the same bridge as he did 20 years ago, and the reason is his/her own conveinence, that would not fly. By itself, I would agree. However, in this metaphor, concrete got 15x cheaper in the same timeframe. Not enough to fully compensate for the difference, but enough that a whole generation are now used to much larger edifices.
So it means you could save your client 93% of their money in concrete, but you choose to make it 2× more expensive! That only makes my metaphor stronger ahaha.
You could save 93% of the money in concrete, at the cost of ???* in the more-expensive-than-ever time of the engineer themselves who now dominates the sticker price.
(At this point the analogy breaks down because who pays for the software being slower is the users' time, not the taxes paid by a government buying a bridge from a civil engineer…)
* I don't actually buy the argument that the last decade or so of layers of "abstraction" save us developers any time at all, rather I think they're now several layers deep of nested inner platforms that each make things more complicated, but that's a separate entire thread, and blog post: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html
Re: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Slack/Teams handles company-wide video calls and can render anything a web browser can, and they run an entire App Store of apps, all from a cross-platform application. The 4th Gen iPod touch had 256 meg of RAM and also did those things, with video calling via FaceTime (and probably others, but I don't care). Well, except "cross platform", what with it being the platform.
Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12. Remember that Slack does simultaneous multiple participants screen sharing plus annotations plus HD video feeds from all participants plus the entirety of the rest of the app continues to function as if you weren’t on a call at all simultaneously. It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think…
> Group FaceTime calls didn’t exist at the time. That wasn’t added until 2018 and required iOS 12.
And CU-SeeMe did that in the early 90s with even worse hardware: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:CU-Schools.GIF
Even more broadly, group calls were sufficiently widely implemented to get themselves standardised 29 years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.323
> It’s an extremely powerful application when you really step back and think about it. It just looks like “text” and boring business software.
The *entire operating system of the phone* is more powerful, and ran on less.
Re: Show HN: Z80-μLM, a 'Conversational AI' That Fits in 40KB
#99Great work. What is your timeline to AGI ?