WorldTUI: I trained a 360M model to pretend to be a terminal
simedw.com61 points by alphax314 4 hours ago
61 points by alphax314 4 hours ago
>I used Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B as the starting point. I needed a small model to get close to realtime performance. Being a coding model, it had also already seen plenty of CLI usage.
Interesting. I wanted to ask, how that model compares with the fine-tuned version, but I just saw the author provided benchmarks. Interesting that fine-tuning improved the memory so significantly, wouldn't have expected that.
Though, on second thought, I had an experience where I was able to, as a human, fine-tune my memory beyond what I previously thought was possible!
Reminds me of one of my favorite jokes.
Excuse me, can you tell me how to get to Carnegie Hall?
—Practice, man... Practice...
I regretfully suspect this actually is the future of UI. You just need smart local models running fast enough to keep the framerate high, but that’s inevitable in the long term, isn’t it?
We had decades to work on making software more performant, but instead most users' space-age 2nm chips spend most of their time running Javascript because it was faster to make software that way.
Why would you do that instead of having the model do the task you're using the UI for? It could generate UI widgets on-the-fly as needed to take richer inputs.
Reminds me of this project from Microsoft. A Quake II “simulation” model where the whole application was just a model.
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/articles/whamm-real...
These are called world models, which is why the project is called WorldTUI. For another example, take a look at Google's recent Genie models. https://deepmind.google/blog/genie-2-a-large-scale-foundatio...
It would be interesting to expose this on the internet. I wonder what the scrapers etc… would do with it.
Very cool. Fun project. I feel like there’s a wide field to be explored once you understand fine tuning good existing models
Wait, how did it `sleep 3`? I thought LLMs didn't have a concept of time
It’s still rendering frames constantly, no? So it just figures the next X frames are all doing nothing?
from the post:
Time is an input too. If nothing is pressed, the model gets a WAIT token with a duration instead of a key, which is how snake keeps moving on its own.
That seems as likely as anything, but that just moves the problem to counting, doesn't it? The model gets the duration, but I was under the impression LLMs struggled with the arithmetic that would make that useful.
Idk about Qwen 2.5 Coder that this is based on, but modern models don't struggle with arithmetic. I see Qwen 3.8 do long-hand math in thinking traces (ie. it outputs 17+35+12=64 in the thinking trace) so I would imagine this is something they train into the model specifically. Sometimes it creates and runs a simple python script to check its work.
There was a whole fake gui OS with similar concept right
athropic had an experiment that did exactly this. we need more experimentation in this space.
Wow! This this reminds me of when we tried doing this with gpt 3 and.. it worked!
The tmux thing had me confused for a moment until i realized it was emulating tmux. Super fun. Is the model window width aware?
[flagged]
Where is the point of this project if i have terminal ?
Terminal world models have many applications, but empirical observation of successful pretraining or fine-tuning can be significant for encapsulating from rather expensive Bash traces, such as ones obtained from systems with scarce accelerators, etc.
Sometimes it's just fun to do something absurd because you can. This is one of the reasons software is exciting.