from Hacker News

Someone got an LLM running on a Commodore 64 from 1982, and it runs as well

by ghuntley on 5/18/25, 5:47 PM with 17 comments

  • by oac on 5/18/25, 7:11 PM

    It runs a model with 260K params, so hardly a "Large" LM. Nevertheless, a cool project.

  • by blkhawk on 5/21/25, 11:49 AM

    If anyone wants to try it with an esp32:

    https://github.com/DaveBben/esp32-llm

    needs a board with PSRAM but they are surprisingly plenty these days - almost standard. I tried it a few months back.

  • by JPLeRouzic on 5/18/25, 6:41 PM

  • by Quarrel on 5/21/25, 1:05 PM

    I've read the criticisms here, but well, as someone whose first computer was a C64, this is cool as hell.

    Like, what?!

    On an 8-bit, 64Kb, ~1MHz CPU!

    Amazing.

    Sure, there are too many caveats, but this isn't really about making this a viable modern alternative.

    It's just about, well, being very cool? Nostalgic!

    And in that, I think it succeeds.

  • by johann8384 on 5/21/25, 2:34 PM

    Imagine where we would be today if this was where we were on the C64 in 1982. If we had the concept and ability to create these models and run them on machines and how much that would have evolved by now.

    Amazing.