Hacker News

Llama.cpp on a jailbroken PS5: run any GGUF model natively on the console

78 points by Anon84 3 hours ago | 25 comments

shiftpgdn 29 minutes ago

Conceivably this should also work on the BC250 cards, which are ex-cryptocurrency mining motherboard built around AMD's "Cyan Skillfish" APU which is a cut-down version of the PlayStation 5's custom silicon. You can still pick them up on ebay for $150-$200.

haunter 18 minutes ago

Good luck finding one for $150 or even for $200

And at that price point or a little bit more you might as well just get an RTX 3060 and save yourself a lot of hassle (you also get DLSS, DLAA etc.)

shiftpgdn 14 minutes ago

I paid $150 shipped a few months ago then maybe $40-50 for all the parts to run it. The RTX 3060 sells for $400+ in my market and still needs a computer to attach it to!

LoganDark 4 minutes ago

Just opened up eBay and they're going for like $200 here, $220 if you want a "modded BIOS" (whatever that means).

xnx 17 minutes ago

I've never even considered getting a PS5, but hackers converting a locked-down appliance into a general purpose computer has me really reconsidering.

stuxnet79 4 minutes ago

Well that locked-down appliance is way under-specced compared to an equivalent build at the same price.

Rabbit504030201 38 minutes ago

The project's primary site should not be GitHub, and I am serious. Playstation 5 is not some historical curiosity and Sony might strike the page down any hour now.

Those projects should default to hosts less geared toward corporate governancy; custom internet domain being the first requirement.

LoganDark 3 minutes ago

> Those projects should default to hosts less geared toward corporate governancy; custom internet domain being the first requirement.

I struggle to think of anywhere on the entire open internet you could put something like this where it could not be taken down.

Retr0id 21 minutes ago

I'm sure Sony has an opinion of the jailbreaks that enable this, but they really don't give a shit about anyone running llama.cpp. Why would they? They're just glad you're not pirating games.

xp84 13 minutes ago

Is there a real or imagined hardware subsidy on the PS5 hardware though? In other words, is the current MSRP below what Sony would charge in a hypothetical world where they weren’t involved in any form of gaming software business, with an assumption that they will make additional margin dollars from game sales? I can see some manager making the case that repurposing the hardware for non-gaming use is taking food off his family’s table, in a manner of speaking. If so, it’s an argument that you don’t want this type of use to become popular and have PS5s start flying off shelves and never having games bought for them.

minimaxir 20 minutes ago

There's no feasible way to avoid takedowns/DMCA in 2026 unless you do TOR shenanigans. Even with a custom domain, Sony could just DMCA the web host for the project.

kevmo314 15 minutes ago

Sure you can. This repo has definitely been vacuumed into the latest training data dump, so the next generation of models will happily spit out a similar reproduction, Sony be damned!

nekusar 8 minutes ago

Gitflic.ru begs to differ.

pwython 46 minutes ago

With this in mind, having LLM-powered NPCs would be a beautiful thing. There's been limited testing on PC games (PUBG Ally), but I can imagine it will be the standard.

tiahura 28 minutes ago

Fortnite Darth Vader already did

drewg123 39 minutes ago

For somebody who hasn't kept up with all the different open source models and what token rates mean, how would using this compare to something like codex or claude? I assume it would be much slower and less capable..?

robotswantdata 30 minutes ago

Significantly slower and less capable than opus 5.5

However you can run comparable or better models than gpt4. Try to stay under 30b

kevmo314 2 hours ago

Not long until Anthropic's dreams of self-replicating models starts taking over PS5s!

crorella 2 hours ago

Haha, I was thinking the same, I think we will see the most random devices being able to host models in the near future. An army for the techno core.

randomblock1 2 hours ago

Relevant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

russellbeattie 2 hours ago

Obligatory... "Can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of these?"

Anon84 2 hours ago