Bare metal

I find myself day­dreaming about a lan­guage model run­ning on bare metal; a system where the lan­guage model IS the computer: the whole thing.

No memory allocation, no programs, no files … just a single con­text window. That’s it — that’s the “workspace”. For input and output, I’m thinking: a mono­chrome LCD, the cool amber kind, and an extremely clicky keyboard.

This would be CPU-only: slow and steady. I sup­pose you’d need a bootloader … but nothing more! Def­i­nitely no Linux. No OS of any kind.

It’s fun to think about it in the con­text of permacomputing. The lan­guage model itself is exotic tech, near-alien, but once it’s inscribed in a simple, robust system … the device could, conceivably, last a long time, and operate in distant/difficult environments.

Strong Dying Earth vibes: the gnomic lump of tech dis­cov­ered in Sloan’s for­bidden tomb … and, once activated, it is oracular. It knows things!

Closer at hand, I think “the AI model is the whole computer” is strange and provocative, just like “the AI model is the whole video game”. I find both sce­narios fairly unpleasant — they make me feel itchy — but not uninteresting. Personal-ish com­puters have run on a pretty stan­dard archi­tec­ture for fifty years — which is only to say, an Altair owner from 1975 would “get” what my 2025 laptop is doing — and it surely won’t last forever.