I've been experimenting with getting a tiny circa-2015 recurrent neural network to generate Halloween costumes. Running on a single cat hair-covered laptop, char-rnn has no internet training, but learns from scratch to imitate the data I give it.

A little while ago I revisited a dataset from 2018,

I've recently been experimenting with one of my favorite old-school neural networks, a tiny program that runs on my laptop and knows only about the data I give it. Without internet training, char-rnn doesn't have outside references to draw on (for better or for worse) but

After seeing generated text evolve from the days of tiny neural networks to today's ChatGPT-style large language models, I have to conclude: there's something special about the tiny guys.

Maybe it's the way the tiny neural networks string together text letter by letter just