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My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

simonwillison.net

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Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#6
> Two years ago when I first tried LLaMA I never dreamed that the same laptop I was using then would one day be able to run models with capabilities as strong as what I’m seeing from GLM 4.5 Air—and Mistral 3.2 Small, and Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and a host of other high quality models that have emerged over the past six months.

Yes, the open-models have surpassed my expectations in both quality and speed of release. For a bit of context, when chatgpt launched in Dec22, the "best" open models were GPT-J(~6-7B) and GPT-neoX (~22B?). I actually had an app running live, with users, using gpt-j for ~1 month. It was a pain. The quality was abysmal, there was no instruction following (you had to start your prompt like a story, or come up with a bunch of examples and hope the model will follow along) and so on.

And then something happened, LLama models got "leaked" (I still think it was a on purpose leak - don't sue us, we never meant to release, etc), and the rest is history. With L1 we got lots of optimisations like quantised models, fine-tuning and so on, L2 really saw fine-tuning go off (most of the fine-tunes were better than what meta released), we got alpaca showing off LoRA, and then a bunch of really strong models came out (mistrals, mixtrals, L3, gemmas, qwens, deepseeks, glms, granites, etc.)

By some estimations the open models are ~6mo behind what SotA labs have released. (note that doesn't mean the labs are releasing their best models, it's likely they keep those in house to use on next runs data curation, synthetic datasets, for distilling, etc). Being 6mo behind is NUTS! I never in my wildest dreams believed we'll be here. In fact I thought it would take ~2years to reach gpt3.5 levels. It's really something insane that we get to play with these models "locally", fine-tune them and so on.

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#7
post #2

I bet the training data included enough space invader cloned in JS

Which would make this disappointing if it was only good at cloning space invaders. If it can reproduce all the clone it has ever seen it would still be an impressive feat.

I just think we should stop to appreciate exactly how awesome language models are. It's compressing and correctly reproducing a lot of data with meaningful context between each token and the rest of the context window. It's still amazing, specially with smaller models like this, because even if it's reproducing a clone, you can still ask questions about it and it should perform reasonably well explaining you what it does and how you can take it over to further develop that clone.

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#9

Is there any website to see the minimum/recommended hardware required for running local LLMs? Much like 'system requirements' mentioned for games.

https://apxml.com/tools/vram-calculator

This one is very good in my opinion.

Re: My 2.5 year old laptop can write Space Invaders in JavaScript now (GLM-4.5 Air)

#10
I appreciate you sharing both the chat log and the full source code. I would be interested to see a followup post on how adding moderately-sized features like High Score go.

Also, IANAL but Space Invaders is owned IP. I have no idea the legality of a blog post describing steps to create and releasing an existing game, but I've seen headlines on HN of engs in trouble for things I would not expect to be problematic. Maybe Space Invaders is in q-tip/band-aid territory at this point?, but if this was Zelda instead of Space Invaders, I could see things being more dicey.

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