Autoregressive Language Model on the 6502 Processor

(mattbeton.com)

105 points | by nmstoker 2 days ago

11 comments

  • vintermann 2 hours ago
    From my experience, modern machine learning models don't scale well down at all, and it's almost certainly better to just use a simple Markov chain variant of some sort - like Niall on the Amiga, or whatever Terry Pratchett used to come up with Foul Ol' Ron's catchphrase, "Millennium hand and shrimp".
  • derefr 7 hours ago
    > The model weights and inference code need to be contained within 25KB of user-space memory

    Wouldn’t it be era-appropriate to allow relying on banked memory? You’d still need to hold the inference code, but you could effectively stream(ing page) the weights as you compute on them.

    • striking 6 hours ago
      From a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Micro#Specifications I think the 6502 versions of the beeb didn't have banked RAM so to keep it loadable from tape the limits might be as stated.

      But with substantial additional effort, maybe some banked ROMs could be added..?

      • froh 3 hours ago
        the banking was done via an external ram controller whose bank control register was mapped to some (unbanked) controller address.
  • bmc7505 9 hours ago
    Cool to think this demo would have been possible over fifty years ago. I wonder what someone from 1975 would have said if you had shown this to them back then.
  • tyromaniac 9 hours ago
    This is super cool! As someone who's worked a little with NES programming and tried out cc65, I'm surprised he didn't just hand write some assembly, he likely couldve saved a lot of space if I had to guess.
  • actionfromafar 9 hours ago
    The 6502 is notoriously unfit for a C compiler, so probably there is room for more performance in the future. :)
  • torment-nexus 7 hours ago
    The biggest win for AI dev efficiency is cutting down what gets loaded into context. Semantically matching tasks to the top tools helps a lot.
  • toplinesoftsys 9 hours ago
    This is amazing project! I hope it will result in real miniaturization of AI - for example, edge LLM inside of glasses. That will be awesome.
  • aghilmort 4 hours ago
    really great work
  • leonmeng 6 hours ago
    [flagged]