25 comments

  • blurbleblurble 8 minutes ago
    This is cool but it'd be way more useful if they had made a GPU, seeing as how expensive those have gotten
  • tiborsaas 1 hour ago
    This is fun and games, but wait until an agents finds this and does the most misaligned thing with it in order to fold paper clips.

    > Because a CPU inside a language model clearly wasn't cursed enough, I decided the prudent thing would be to give it a filesystem too.

    Love the spirit :)

  • giveexamples 8 minutes ago
    https://www.percepta.ai/blog/can-llms-be-computers

    They implemented wasm in transformer with cpu decoding for the wasm part.

  • jerrythegerbil 47 minutes ago
    There was an interesting bit of research that qwen has a single neuron that makes it “demonic evil qwen” and a simple “Who are you?” will get some absolutely terrifyingly vile results.

    Anyways, what I’m trying to say is I want evil qwen to be my CPU.

    • krackers 33 minutes ago
      The single-neuron steering stuff has been going around twitter lately, do you happen to know who was the first one to do it?

      I wonder how this squares with the recent "NNs are already clean" interpretability finding, which may have also been the impetus for this kind of research. Similar to their work on CNNs, maybe residual-steering is overkill, there might be just a single neuron that "cleanly" corresponds to "evilness" that you can turn up/down?

  • jonrouach 4 minutes ago
    i wonder if you could implement "authenticated token authorship" and self-verified running with this. the model verifies an input as signed by an authorized requester, and signs its own outputs. eventually it also authenticates its own running via e.g. snarks? :) there's lots of meta available with these toys..
  • andai 24 minutes ago
    > Now, here's where our fun experiment starts. I found out that by setting the gate to 1,1 the write strength (beta) to 1,2 and using one-hot key encoding,3 every write we perform will overwrite exactly one row, and every one-hot query can retrieve an exact value. This means that the GDN layers themselves can work exactly as RAM, at a far lower cost than using normal attention as RAM, since a GDN head's state stays the same size however long the conversation gets, unlike attention's KV cache.

    So like... can't you use a computer as a computer without doing all that roundabout stuff? Like if you want to integrate a LLM with hard computation there's probably a more efficient way to do that.

    Or is this building towards "but can it run DOOM?" :)

    • rao-v 15 minutes ago
      I’ve always wondered why we don’t add a few frozen “layers” to models that perform complex computations 2/3rds deep in the model. Some set of steerable fft + some common vector math operations could be reusable units of capability that the model learns to leverage during training.

      Given that models learn to use residual connections optimally, it can’t be hard for them to steer around the fixed computation layer when it’s not needed.

      I’m sure giant models invest a few layers in reproducing these functions, but surely smaller models can benefit?

  • mkturkcan 19 minutes ago
    Nice project and write up! I’ve done similar work with a custom tiny network I call Loom at https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.08816 ; you need far fewer layers, and you can run Doom, very slowly: https://mehmetkeremturkcan.com/Loom/demos/
  • jazzyjackson 1 hour ago
    > When Qwen 'saves' a file, the compiled layers hash its name into one of 1,024 slots in a directory kept in the DeltaNet state, and store the text itself in other heads, with eight tokens per row, chained together

    I’ve never wanted to learn how LLMs work more than reading this. Fascinating.

    Does divagr get paid to do wild things with LLMs? Just curious if they’re being compensated for these wild experiments

  • traverseda 1 hour ago
    I'd be very interested in how a scratch trained model that started training with this neural circuitry would behave. Especially the storage space.
    • horacemorace 1 hour ago
      Along these lines I’m curious how a scratch trained model with a few built-in tools (memory, calculator, ?) available during a single generation would behave. Not tool calls as turns.
      • low_tech_punk 1 hour ago
        a single generation would still allow looping in the "CPU" because the instruction set can do it. The model is almost a Turing machine (except for the limit on memory)
  • yaoke259 44 minutes ago
    It could be interesting to experiment with more complex representations in the memory/file system, i.e. vectors. Seems like the full advantage of this architecture is yet to be explored. Blending neurons with deterministic compute to fit on one GPU is a fascination concept, never considered it before!
  • ansk 19 minutes ago
    This is slop.

    A community the size of HN with a democratic upvote system will never be able to filter out slop as advanced as this.

    I honestly think HN is on its deathbed.

  • rumwerfer 35 minutes ago
    But can it run Doom?
  • bronlund 59 minutes ago
    No, I don’t want you to use the computer, I want you to be the whole computer. No mistakes.
  • farhanhubble 1 hour ago
    This is cool and I understand the RAM emulation with gated attention but how does the CPU emulation wor? You add layers that are then trained to predict outputs while interpreting RISC instructions?
    • bee_rider 1 hour ago
      I think they describe the CPU using the weights? I mean in some sense a CPU can be viewed as just a function, right?
    • anon291 38 minutes ago
      At each cycle, a cpu is a simple function from the previous state to the next state.
  • zardo 42 minutes ago
    How much VRAM do I need to run DOOM?
  • voxelghost 42 minutes ago
    Makes me want to run agents on it
  • dools 26 minutes ago
    Have you any idea how it feels to be a Qwenputer living in a Qwenbot's Qwenputer's world?
  • ram_rattle 1 hour ago
    Cool cool cool
  • seba_dos1 57 minutes ago
    Now run LLM inference on it.
    • deepsquirrelnet 38 minutes ago
      butterfly Is this AGI?
    • serf 38 minutes ago
      this is the sensation I get when I run nested VMs.
  • hujun236 22 minutes ago
    [flagged]
  • cinderwick 1 hour ago
    [flagged]
  • rickcarlino 1 hour ago
    If anyone else has an easier way to emulate RISC-V I’d like to hear it. /S
  • gigel82 1 hour ago
    But... why? </s>

    This reminds me of C++ Template Metaprogramming (TMP) (it's Turing-complete so people wrote "games" that run at compile time). The same with TypeScript types, I think someone got DOOM running entirely in the TypeScript type system. An interesting tech demo but entirely superfluous.

  • rvz 1 hour ago
    So this is yet another rube goldberg machine.

    We have gone down this path already in [0] and this is the same thing but overly complicated. This reason is "because LLMs".

    Why?

    [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/1410.5401

    • jwitthuhn 1 hour ago
      It is a great example to refute the common misconception that LLMs are inherently non-deterministic. I see people repeating this a lot and being able to point at a CPU implemented within one is a very strong counter-example.