README.md

---
title: Dreamling
emoji: 🌱
colorFrom: indigo
colorTo: pink
sdk: gradio
sdk_version: 6.17.3
python_version: '3.12'
app_file: app.py
pinned: false
short_description: Raise a from-scratch baby AI that learns to talk.
---

# 🌱 Dreamling

A whimsical creature with a brain trained **from scratch** — about **0.3M parameters**, no
pretrained model, learning to talk live on a **CPU**. Fully off-grid.

- It's a **newborn**: at first it can only babble **`dream? dream! dream-dream…`**
- **Talk to it** and it learns *your* words — babble → letter-soup → fragments → speech.
- Tell it it's **good 👍** or **bad 👎** and you shape its **personality**: kindness makes it
  bold and bright 🦋, harshness makes it withdraw 🐚, spoiling it makes it wild 🐉.
- A live **personality chart** and its **evolution** reflect who it's becoming.

## How it works — **two tiny models from scratch**

1. **Voice** — a char-level Transformer (~0.3M params) seeded only on the word *dream*. While
   awake it babbles with what it knows and remembers what you say; when it **dreams 🌙** it
   trains on the day's words (next-character learning) and wakes up able to use them.
2. **Mood** — a second tiny net (~few hundred params) reads the interaction (praise/scolding,
   words it didn't understand, pace, tiredness) and outputs a point in an emotional space
   (valence × arousal × dominance). ~40 named moods are anchors in that space; it *learns a
   temperament* over time.

The mood steers the voice — tone, length, and **behavior**: confused → it echoes your unknown
words back (`sun? sun?`); exhausted → it yawns and begs to dream; scolded → it withdraws;
spoiled → it gets wild. Personality and mood decide which creature it **evolves** into
(🥚→🐛→🦋 / 🐚 / 🐉).

No pretrained weights, no GPU, no external APIs. Built for the **Build Small** hackathon
(Thousand Token Wood). Each visitor gets their own creature; it lives for the session.