Re-posting this from a buried comment for visibility because it's just so fucking impressive to me.

I went to the store to buy mixers and while I was out Gemma 4 31b got pretty far along with reverse engineering the bluetooth protocol of a desk thermometer I have. I forgot to turn on the web search tool, so it just went at it, writing more and more specific diagnostic logging/probing tools over the course of like 8 turns. It connected to the thermometer, scanned the characteristics and had made a dump of the bluetooth notification data. When I got back it was theorizing about how the data might be encoded in the bluetooth characteristics and it got into an infinite loop. (local models aren't perfect and i never said they were) I turned on the websearch tool and told it to "pick up the project where it left off", it read the directory, did a couple googles and had a working script to print temperature, humidity and battery state in like 3 turns. Reading back throught it's chain of thought I'm pretty sure it would have been able to get it eventually without googling.

idk, I thought I was a cool and smart engineer type for being able to do stuff like this, if my GPUs being able to do this more or less unsupervised isn't impressive I guess fuck me lol.

It definitly is and just a few years ago unheared of.

And we progress on so many different frontiers in parallel: Agent harness, Agent model, hardware etc.