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Veteran Windows dev shows off AI running on 47-year-old PDP11 with 6 MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM — 'gloriously absurd' project runs transformer model written in PDP-11 assembly language

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Tom's Hardware

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TL;DR

AI Generated

Veteran Windows developer Dave Plummer showcased a unique project where he trained an AI model on a 47-year-old PDP-11 system with minimal resources - a 6 MHz CPU and 64KB of RAM. The model, named 'Attention 11,' was written in PDP-11 assembly language and successfully learned to reverse sequences of eight digits. Despite the system constraints, the AI model achieved 100% accuracy after about 350 training steps, demonstrating the essence of learning on a small scale. Plummer emphasizes the importance of efficiency and optimization in the face of compute resource limitations, suggesting that embracing these principles could provide a competitive edge in modern AI development.

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