Hello. I am a digital craftsperson. I go by BoneAmputee online.
You can follow me here:
Discord |
GitHub |
Instagram |
Twitter
BATbot was born Thursday, May 17, 2018 3:54 PM CDT into the chat room of adultswim.com. Its initial purpose was to allow me to enhance the Adult Swim Live Stream with functionalities I desired without needing to coordinate with anyone at Adult Swim, and also to learn Python.
It started with things like .songinfo, which used ACRCloud's API to identify songs on the live stream, and .markov, which returned a markov chain generation from the user's previous posts, and eventually char-rnn and word-rnn were deployed.
2019In February 2019, gpt-2 was released, and I was quick to create a conversational loop for BATbot, running on my 1080 Ti. I eventually finetuned a 345M model on the chat's history to enhance its performance (thank you, nshepperd for the finetuning code & gwern for the write-up).
2020In November 2020, the Adult Swim Live Streams were cancelled as a result of corporate merger. By then, BATbot had accrued somewhere around 100 bespoke commands. Because my chat room of interest was soon to be deleted, I created a Discord server for [as] chat refugees and continued my bot development there.
2021In January 2021, OpenAI released CLIP and I was quick to integrate it into BATbot in as many ways as possible. The first was .clip for basic comparisons of images against a list of texts. .actorinfo followed that, which used CLIP, IMDb and metadata from my media player to determine which actor was currently on my screen.
Then I began dropping in several CLIP-powered image generators, with a command called .imagine. I deployed this bot into the EleutherAI Discord where, in April of 2021, CoreWeave generously donated 16 GPUs to its cause. This allowed it to get very popular and garnered the attention of several founders, including David Holz, who invited me to collaborate on the foundation of Midjourney, but I was already working for someone else on a similar project, and feared a non-compete clause.
The project I did work on was called Pixelmind, which was unfortunately crypto-adjacent and consequently had no chance of serious adoption.
I also implemented CLIP-based emoji reactions in Discord around this time, which I've still never seen anyone else do, for some reason.
2022I spent most of 2022 empoloyed to work on Pixelmind, but continued BATbot development in my free time.
2023In January of 2023, Pixelmind was abandoned by its founder and suddenly I had lots of free time to finesse BATbot.
In April of 2023, after a two year run, EleutherAI decided to re-allocate its donated compute towards other aspirations.
We continue generating with a local A6000 as well as several remote APIs.
2024In 2024, BATbot's generative AI capabilities expanded dramatically. Early in the year, I added support for TripoSR for 3D model generation and Kandinsky-3 for text-to-image generation. By mid-year, BATbot gained access to Stable Diffusion 3, AuraFlow, Stable Cascade, and Flux - with the latter becoming a primary focus of ongoing improvements including LoRA support and various technical refinements.
The second half of 2024 saw major additions to video generation capabilities, including CogVideoX, VEnhancer, MiniMax, Luma, Pyramid Flow, Kling, and Hunyuan Video. The bot also gained access to new 3D generation models like Hunyuan3D, InstantMesh, and TRELLIS.
To better serve the community, I improved many quality-of-life features like video-to-GIF conversion, enhanced progress reporting, and more informative status displays. I also migrated to more integrated backend solutions to improve stability and performance.
October of 2024 marked a revolutionary moment when advances in language models fundamentally changed our approach to development. This catalyzed the expansion into multiple specialized platforms: BATbot AI for creative tools and conversation, BATbot Online for our emerging metaverse, and BATbot TV for media streaming. These services, along with their supplementary features, are now unified under batbot.app.
TodayWhat began as a simple chatroom bot has evolved into an ecosystem of interconnected platforms. While BATbot continues to serve as a helpful creative assistant, it's now the centerpiece of a broader vision encompassing social interaction, content creation, and media distribution. Though these platforms are maturing independently, they share a common goal: building tools and spaces that enhance how people connect, create, and share with each other.