> 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.)