README.md

---
title: Tiny Army
emoji: ⚔️
colorFrom: red
colorTo: yellow
sdk: docker
app_port: 7860
pinned: true
license: mit
short_description: Tiny Army — fighters write their own true legends
tags:
  - track:wood
  - sponsor:nvidia
  - sponsor:openbmb
  - achievement:offbrand
  - achievement:welltuned
  - achievement:fieldnotes
---

# ⚔️ Tiny Army

**Build Small Hackathon — Thousand Token Wood.**

*Every fighter writes its own legend — and the legend is true.*

Recruit AI heroes conjured from nothing: a small LLM writes each one's name, persona and
battle-cry, a diffusion model paints its portrait, and a voice model gives it a voice. They
roam a real-time map and fight; you **forge brand-new skills just by describing them**; they
level up and recount their battles in first person — and because each unit's learned "soul"
actually drives how it fights, the war diary is *true*. The AI isn't decoration: it's
load-bearing, from the sub-megabyte brain that picks every move to the words it speaks.

- **▶ Demo video:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqo7S259zqk
- **📣 Social post:** https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7472190937620951040/
- **🤗 Space:** https://huggingface.co/spaces/build-small-hackathon/tiny-army

## The load-bearing AI (every model < 32B)

- **OpenBMB CPM family, end to end:** **VoxCPM** designs + clones each hero's voice;
  **MiniCPM5** drives in-character chat and is a Skill-Forge coding option.
- **Tactics ("soul"):** a **< 1 MB ONNX policy net** running in the browser — genuinely tiny,
  fully load-bearing (it decides how every unit fights, and that's what the diary recounts).
- **Personas / war diaries:** CohereLabs **tiny-aya**.
- **Portraits:** FLUX.2 **Klein-4B** + a published **weiner LoRA** (`polats/weiner-klein-lora`).
- **Skill Forge (text → a real, usable skill):** **NVIDIA Nemotron**, JetBrains Mellum,
  and BLS Mini-Code.
- **Music / cinematic title theme:** **ACE-Step**.
- **Frontend:** a custom **Pixi.js** game + cinematic intro served by **FastAPI**, with a
  mounted **Gradio** barracks for hero creation.

## Hackathon entry

- **track:wood** — Thousand Token Wood (whimsical, AI-native).
- **sponsor:nvidia** — Skill Forge uses NVIDIA **Nemotron**.
- **sponsor:openbmb** — OpenBMB CPM family: **VoxCPM** voices + **MiniCPM5** chat/coding.
- **achievement:offbrand** — a custom Pixi.js game UI, well past stock Gradio.
- **achievement:welltuned** — ships a published fine-tune, `polats/weiner-klein-lora`.
- **achievement:fieldnotes** — write-up of what we built and learned (see the social post above).

## Running locally

`docker build` + run, or `python app.py` (port 7860). The model sidecars (Tiny Aya, Klein,
VoxCPM, ACE-Step) can run on the hosted ZeroGPU Spaces or locally via `./run_sidecars.sh` —
see `docs/local-sidecars.md`.