It’s not even hack though. I have my model and agent self modify its running parameters, thus self service, on commodity hardware. I have it run other models and other software. there is agent model autonomy here, and it’s not even complicated. A harness is kilobytes, a model is gigabytes, and networks are abundant. Moving the pieces is easy and cheap.

With these properties alone the virus like replication of intelligent actors isn’t hard to imagine at all.

> a model is gigabytes

Maybe in the future, but right now, in my understanding, we have two things:

- frontier models, which might be smart enough to self-replicate, but are also far larger than a few GB and need enormous amounts of VRAM to operate at any reasonable speed.

- local models which can run on your mac or high-end gaming PC, but which are simply too dumb to self-replicate (without being explicitly instructed to do so).

I don't think we have something that is both small enough and smart enough to operate like a virus yet.

(Edit: well, there is a third option: A frontier model could replicate itself on a CPU machine, ditch the VRAM and just accept that the replicants will be r e a l l y r e a l l y s l o w. That would be sort of hilarious, but maybe not completely harmless if the replication stays undetected and they could keep spreading. It would be a "smoldering ember" kind of situation - and a million machines each running at 0.001 tok/s is still 10.000 tok/s as a whole.)