llama.ttfllama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
llama.ttf is a font file which is also a large language model and an inference engine for that model.
The font shaping engine HarfBuzz, used in applications such as Firefox and Chrome,
comes with a Wasm shaper allowing arbitrary code to be
used to "shape" text.
In particular, this "arbitrary" code could in principle be an entire LLM inference engine with trained parameters bundled inside,
relying on treating text containing magic symbols for fake "ligatures" to initialize the LLM and use it to generate text.
It could also in principle be an entire LLM inference engine (Llama
in our case, hence the name) except instead of only being in principle it's what this is.
At the end of the day, what this means is that you can just use the font to run the LLM and e.g. get text generation in any
Wasm-enabled HarfBuzz-based application; your favorite text editor/email client/whatever without having to wait for the vendor to include
the "Copilot"-like features that everyone is rushing to implement these days. And everything runs
completely locally. So perhaps this silly hack is in fact a billion dollar idea!? This also means that you can use your font to
chat with your font.
So in case that doesn't make sense (after all, does it?), here's an attempt to make it make more sense:
Skip to 6:09 if you just want to see the font in action.
Just download llama.ttf (60 MB download, since it's
based on the 15M parameter TinyStories-based model demoed above) and use it like you would any other font. Use it somewhere where HarfBuzz is used
and built with Wasm support.
The simplest way to experiment with this is probably to build HarfBuzz with -Dwasm=enabled and build
wasm-micro-runtime with -DWAMR_BUILD_REF_TYPES=1,
then add the resulting shared libraries, libharfbuzz.so.0.60811.0 and libiwasm.so to the LD_PRELOAD
environment variable before running a HarfBuzz-based application such as gedit or GIMP; no recompilation of the applications is required.
If this didn't seem pointless enough, here are some other weird things people have done with fonts and LLMs: