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

simonwillison.net

21–30 of 415 posts

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

#21

> 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…

is GLM 4.5 better than Qwen3 coder??

For what? It's really hard to say what model is "generally" better then another, as they're all better/worse at specific things.

My own benchmarks has a bunch of different tasks I use various local models for, and I run it when I wanna see if a new model is better than the existing ones I use. The output is basically a markdown table with a description of which model is best for what task.

They're being sold as general purpose things that are better/worse at everything but reality doesn't reflect this, they all have very specific tasks they're worse/better at, and the only way to find that out is by having a private benchmark you run yourself.

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

#23
post #12

"2.5 year old laptop" is potentially the most useless way of describing a 64GB M2, as it could be confused with virtually any other configuration of laptop.

I think the point is just that it doesn't require absolute cutting edge nor server hardware.

It was also something he already had lying around. Did not need to buy something new to get new functionality.

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

#24

If I understand correctly, the author is managing to run this model on a laptop with 64GB of RAM? So a home workstation with 64GB+ of RAM could get similar results?

The laptop has "unified RAM", so that's like 64GB of VRAM.

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

#25

If I understand correctly, the author is managing to run this model on a laptop with 64GB of RAM? So a home workstation with 64GB+ of RAM could get similar results?

Only if that RAM is available to a GPU, or you're willing to tolerate extremely slow responses.

The neat thing about Apple Silicon is the system RAM is available to the GPU. On most other systems you would need ~48GB of VRAM.

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

#26

If I understand correctly, the author is managing to run this model on a laptop with 64GB of RAM? So a home workstation with 64GB+ of RAM could get similar results?

Not so sure. The MBP uses hybrid memory, the ram is shared with the cpu and gpu.

Your 64gb workstation doesn't share the ram with your gpu.

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

#27

> 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…

is GLM 4.5 better than Qwen3 coder??

I haven't tried them (released yesterday I think?). The benchmarks look good (similar I'd say) but that's not saying much these days. The best test you can do is have a couple of cases that match your needs, and run them yourself w/ the cradle that you are using (aider, cline, roo, any of the CLI tools, etc). Openrouter usually has them up soon after launch, and you can run a quick test really cheap (and only deal with one provider for billing & stuff).

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

#28
Is probably more correct to say - my 2.5 year laptop can RETELL space invaders. Pretty sure it cannot write a game it has never seen, so you can even say - my old laptop can now do this fancy extraction of data from a smart probabilistic blob, where the original things are retold in new colours and forms :)

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

#29
post #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. Ma…

> Space Invaders is owned IP

So is Tetris. And I believe that Snake is also an owned IP although I could be wrong on this one.

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

#30

"2.5 year old laptop" is potentially the most useless way of describing a 64GB M2, as it could be confused with virtually any other configuration of laptop.

The thing I find most notable here is that this is the same laptop I've used to run every open weights model since the original LLaMA.

The models have got so much better without me needing to upgrade my hardware.

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