WorldTUI trains a 360M model to simulate a terminal without executing commands
Developer Simon Edwardsson fine-tuned Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B into WorldTUI, a 360M-parameter model that predicts terminal screen changes from raw keypresses without a shell, filesystem or command execution. The model can imitate file creation, vim, tmux and other terminal interactions, but developer tests found unreliable filesystem behavior and limited success when combining familiar commands in new ways. A 208 MB int4 browser demo runs locally with WebGPU, while model weights were described as forthcoming.
WorldTUI provides a concrete example of a small learned interface model maintaining approximate terminal state without implementing the underlying application rules, alongside published tests and a runnable local demo.
TL;DR: I fine-tuned a 360M-parameter language model to act as a terminal. There's no shell or filesystem behind it: every keypress goes in, and the model predicts how the screen changes. It can create files, run vim and tmux, play snake, and usually remembers what you wrote a few commands later. The biggest wins were teaching it to repair its own mistakes and decoding screen rows in parallel. Try it in your browser (208 MB) and type pythoon to see that it's not a real shell.
The demo is designed for a desktop browser with WebGPU and a physical keyboard. Chrome or Edge is the best place to try it. It should work on a modern phone, but painfully slowly.
Video 13 When I first saw Genie 3 last year, I started imagining a future where applications aren't written in code but learned. Instead of a game engine rendering the scene, a model predicts the next most likely frame from the user's inputs.
Naturally I wanted to train my own world model. But I don't have a massive GPU cluster or a pile of video data, so I scaled down my ambition: instead of a game world, a terminal.
#WorldTUI#Qwen2.5-Coder-0.5B#Simon Edwardsson#WebGPU#Docker#NVIDIA RTX 4090