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

simonwillison.net

31–40 of 415 posts

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

#31
post #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.

Don't think it has the GLM series on there yet.

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

#32
post #17
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I also wouldn't be surprised if labs were starting to mix in a few pelican SVGs into their training data.

Even "accidentally" it makes sense that "SVGs of pelicans riding bikes" are now included into datasets used for training as it has spread as a wildfire on the internet, making it less useful as a simple benchmark. This is why I keep all my benchmarks private and don't share anything about them publicly, as soon as you write about them anywhere publicly they'll stop being useful in some months.

> This is why I keep all my benchmarks private

This is also why, if I were an artist or anyone commercially relying on creative output of any kind, I wouldn't be posting anything on the internet anymore, ever. The minute you make anything public, the engines will clone it to death and turn it into a commodity.

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

#33

Alas, my 3 year old Mac has only 16 GB RAM, and can barely run a browser without running out of memory. It's a work-issued Mac, and we only get upgrades every 4/5 years. I must be content with 8B parameters models from Ollama (some of which are quite good, like llama3.1:8b).

I am able to run Gemma 3 12B on my M1 MBP 16GB. It is pretty good at logic and reasoning!

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

#34

Most likely its training data included countless Space Invaders in various programming languages.

This comment is ~3 years late. Every model since gpt3 has had the entirety of available code in their training data. That's not a gotcha anymore. We went from chatgpt's "oh, look, it looks like python code but everything is wrong" to "here's a full stack boilerplate app that does what you asked and works in 0-shot" inside 2 years. That's the kicker. And the sauce isn't just in the training set, models now do post-tra…

I've had little success with Agentic coding, and what success I have had has been paired with hours of frustration, where I'd have been better off doing it myself for anything but the most basic tasks.

Even then, when you start to build up complexity within a codebase - the results have often been worse than "I'll start generating it all from scratch again, and include this as an addition to the initial longtail specification prompt as well", and even then... it's been a crapshoot.

I _want_ to like it. The times where it initially "just worked" felt magical and inspired me with the possibilities. That's what prompted me to get more engaged and use it more. The reality of doing so is just frustrating and wishing things _actually worked_ anywhere close to expectations.

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

#35
post #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 :)

I know these models can build games and apps they've never seen before because I've already observed them doing exactly that time and time again.

If you haven't seen that yourself yet I suggest firing up the free, no registration required GLM-4.5 Air on https://chat.z.ai/ and seeing if you can prove yourself wrong.

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

#36
post #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 :)

So you're saying it works exactly the same way as humans, who copied Space Invaders from Breakout which came out in 1976.

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

#37

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?

> So a home workstation with 64GB+ of RAM could get similar results?

Similar in quality, but CPU generation will be slower than what macs can do.

What you can do with MoEs (GLMs and Qwens) is to run some experts (the shared ones usually) on a GPU (even a 12GB/16GB will do) and the rest from RAM on CPU. That will speed things up considerably (especially prompt processing). If you're interested in this, look up llama.cpp and especially ik_llama, which is a fork dedicated to this kind of selective offloading of experts.

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

#39
post #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.

That's great! Why can't we say that instead?

No need to overly quantize our headlines.

"64GB M2 makes Space Invaders-- can be bought for under $xxxx"

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

#40
post #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 :)

It's unfortunate that the ideas of things to test first are exactly the things more likely to be contained in training data. Hence why the pelican on a bicycle was such a good test, until it became viral.
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