This terminal isn't real: a 360M model predicts every screen
Why it matters
Developer Simon Edwardsson's WorldTUI is a 360M-parameter model, fine-tuned from Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B, that acts as a terminal with no shell or filesystem behind it: each keypress goes in and the model predicts the next screen. He trained it on 336k terminal episodes (about 2B tokens) recorded from real programs in Docker, using roughly 75 GPU-hours on an RTX 4090. It creates files, runs vim and tmux and plays snake; teaching it to repair its own mistakes, plus extra data, lifted his PresetBench score from 24/47 to 38/47, and it got 9 of 13 file readbacks right vs 2/13 and 3/13 for prompted Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B and Qwen3-0.6B. Decoding screen rows in parallel cut large-frame p95 latency from 6.7 s to 0.87 s, and quantized to 208 MB it runs locally in a browser tab. Caveat: he says it is still far from a reliable filesystem and new command combinations can break it.
Read the source: simedw.com (Simon Edwardsson) (opens in a new tab)
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