For the last five months or so, opus and fable have both been able to do this task as a soneshot prompt. An inference engine is almost pure compute and to a first approximation the only operation your hardware needs to support to do llm inference is multiplication [the rest of an inference engine is "some trig"].
So to get any model working on $OLD_HARDWARE, the hardest part of the task is now sourcing the hardware itself and giving the agent ssh access -- a modern agent will be able to source a compiler, write the implementation, optimize it, test in qemu (or any other simulator) and push it onto the device.
Example prompt: "write an inference engine for qwen3 0.6b in pure assembly that runs on this device. Write a script to attach the weights to the resulting binary. Prefix is supplied as a stream of u32 token IDs on stdin. The engine streams u32 token IDs on stdout."
I agree with you, and I'm using claude and other models heavily, the idea is not in the soneshot - because actually as you see in the logs I posted on github, it took around 107 + 50-ish experiments to figure out which models to run which and push the speed.
I'm treating it as a search algorithm project, where I develop the methdology and search for pushing the limit of devices and searching in a big space of possible kernels and so for what works for a specific hardware.
so I'm looking at it from a different prespective, it takes a lot of brute forcing, and claude can do this well, the whole game (to me) is which directions you push the model into to reduce the search space. and how that learning from very small and tight devices you can scale these techniques.
But in essence, I don't disagree with your sentiment - the goal is not 0.6B models, these are extremely trivial as you mentioned and as I showed in the experiments, the goal is 16B+ models, and this as far as I've seen, requires smart methods to search for optimizations and customizations both to the model and inference engines.
It's technically sweet regardless, so don't take this as even a little bit of negative pushback, but I am curious what the utility of these small models is? Are they smart enough to be useful on practical tasks? What are people doing with them?
Not op but my opinion is that It doesn't matter if it's not currently useful. I think it's important that the community focuses on this line of research because big companies will not. It's in their best interest to make LLMs resource hungry
This is an interesting question, so the idea is, based on experience, fine tuned small models can do narrow tasks very well (my experience running models fine-tuned on customer data as low as 1-2B is very promising) also the goal is to find a breakthrough were instead of the line of work (which I respect) that tries to squeeze much bigger models into smaller hardware like strata and maya, I'm working backward to discover/search for custom kernels and modifications till we exhaust the limit of what a smaller machine is capable of, so instead of people doing 64gb machines and old gpus to run a deepseek, I want to see what is the biggest usable qwen small model can run with reasonable speed on smaller devices, and by scaling as we discover more tricks, normal laptops can unlock more compute - for example a qwen 3.8 27B can do pretty serious work when coupled with a specialized harness - but we are yet to figure out what is the smallest machine that can run it with usable output and usable speed, and this can unlock interesting business.
I mostly agree today, but I'm trying to push for the future where smaller models are more capabable, and I believe it will happen + the fine tuned cases I mentioned in other commments.
On other notes : there is no free lunch, you have to sacrifice something for the other
Recently I started this open source project at my AI company, where I'm trying to make LLMs working
Now Reached 16B models running on iPad Air 1st gen and xiaomi tv box, both have less than 1GB of usable memory, and reached some decent speeds given the hardware.
I'm open sourcing the effort done, kernels developed and results for everyone to re-produce and push more, also the modified models are on hugging face : https://huggingface.co/hyperionaidev
I want a more challenging device, what do you think?
Aw man I would love to be able to use the crank to back up the agent dialogue, maybe make it branch forward in a different direction. Make the dialogue into a game
So to get any model working on $OLD_HARDWARE, the hardest part of the task is now sourcing the hardware itself and giving the agent ssh access -- a modern agent will be able to source a compiler, write the implementation, optimize it, test in qemu (or any other simulator) and push it onto the device.
Example prompt: "write an inference engine for qwen3 0.6b in pure assembly that runs on this device. Write a script to attach the weights to the resulting binary. Prefix is supplied as a stream of u32 token IDs on stdin. The engine streams u32 token IDs on stdout."
I'm treating it as a search algorithm project, where I develop the methdology and search for pushing the limit of devices and searching in a big space of possible kernels and so for what works for a specific hardware.
so I'm looking at it from a different prespective, it takes a lot of brute forcing, and claude can do this well, the whole game (to me) is which directions you push the model into to reduce the search space. and how that learning from very small and tight devices you can scale these techniques.
But in essence, I don't disagree with your sentiment - the goal is not 0.6B models, these are extremely trivial as you mentioned and as I showed in the experiments, the goal is 16B+ models, and this as far as I've seen, requires smart methods to search for optimizations and customizations both to the model and inference engines.
On other notes : there is no free lunch, you have to sacrifice something for the other
0: https://github.com/brysontang/iiama2.c
Now Reached 16B models running on iPad Air 1st gen and xiaomi tv box, both have less than 1GB of usable memory, and reached some decent speeds given the hardware.
I'm open sourcing the effort done, kernels developed and results for everyone to re-produce and push more, also the modified models are on hugging face : https://huggingface.co/hyperionaidev
I want a more challenging device, what do you think?
I'd thought of the ESP32 devices but their RAM is too small
It also runs on MS-DOS 80386 2MB RAM, so...
And iPhone 1. And Digital UNIX.
A Playdate
https://play.date/
One of those vapes with a screen on it.
I'd be interested in seeing some older flag ship mobile devices
Not my site, but same idea: https://www.parkytowers.me.uk/thin/
All this old/obsolete gear is plenty capable when used with the right software.