Tiny models doing surprising things: Doom and a Pico

Two hacks drew delight. Someone ran a world model that plays games on a Raspberry Pi Pico 2 W (50295450), and commenters noted that looped transformers were needed for mini-Doom but not for simpler games. Another Show HN (50297697) turned DOOM itself into a transformer, with 'now everything can run on DOOM?' as the top joke. One commenter says the Pico detail distracts from the world model result itself.

The pattern: the interesting frontier isn't only trillion-parameter models. Small, deterministic networks are being pushed onto hardware that costs a few dollars, and people are asking real questions about whether this is just overfitting. Mistral's 1T model and a Pico-sized world model landed the same day, which shows how wide the range has become.

The skeptical question in the thread is whether this determinism is overfitting, and the answer isn't settled.