AI models may be capable of self-replicating without access to a datacenter

Small AI models may soon be capable of self-replicating onto cheap internet-of-things devices such as smart ovens and off-brand Android TV boxes, according to the authors, William Zhou and Daniel Freeman. In their experiments, a 9B model got inference running on 8 of the 9 hardware types tested. The authors say models of 30B parameters and under can complete many replication steps but make mistakes composing them end to end, while GLM-5.2 and stronger models can replicate end to end in simplified evaluations. They estimate small models will reach this level by the end of the year if they improve at their historical rate.