Artificial Intelligence Developer creates 'conversational AI' that can run in 64kb of RAM on 1976 Zilog Z80 CPU-powered system

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The venerable Zilog Z80 CPU has been around since 1976, and it has powered everything from calculators and home computers to arcade cabinets. But the 8-bit microprocessor isn't exactly a powerful CPU compared to what we use today. That said, developer HarryR has created Z80-μLM, a working "AI" for the well-respected microprocessor. HarryR confirms that it won't pass the Turing test, but it is a bit of fun. And no, the price of Z80s will not be impacted by AI.

According to the readme file, "Z80-μLM is a 'conversational AI' that generates short character-by-character sequences, with quantization-aware training (QAT) to run on a Z80 processor with 64kb of RAM." HarryR's goal is to see how small an AI project can go, while still having a "personality". Can the AI be trained and fine-tuned? It seems that HarryR has done it in just 40KB, including inference, weights, and chat style user interface.

HarryR has kindly detailed the features of this Z80 AI project.
  • Trigram hash encoding: Input text is hashed into 128 buckets - typo-tolerant, word-order invariant
  • 2-bit weight quantization: Each weight is {-2, -1, 0, +1}, packed 4 per byte
  • 16-bit integer inference: All math uses Z80-native 16-bit signed arithmetic
  • ~40KB .COM file: Fits in CP/M's Transient Program Area (TPA)
  • Autoregressive generation: Outputs text character-by-character
  • No floating point: Everything is integer math with fixed-point scaling
  • Interactive chat mode: Just run CHAT with no arguments
www.tomshardware.com

Developer creates 'conversational AI' that can run in 64kb of RAM on 1976 Zilog Z80 CPU-powered system — features a tiny chatbot and a 20-question guessing game

Artificial Intelligence, but in the 1980s!
www.tomshardware.com www.tomshardware.com
 
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