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NanoGPT

github.com

211–220 of 334 posts

Re: NanoGPT

#212
I have taken several masters-level courses in Machine Learning -- and even with those credentials, I cannot recommend enough Andrej's youtube series, "Neural Networks: Zero to Hero". There, he teaches you, from scratch, how to build everything from the underlying automated gradient calculation system in pytorch, all the way up to the slower version of this model - `MinGPT`.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAqhIrjkxbuWI23v9cThs...

(edit: self-promo: I'm currently working on a Typescript follow-through of this same series of video lectures, if you want to follow along with stronger types for explanation: https://github.com/Marviel/lab-grad)

Re: NanoGPT

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would be great if a tradeoff could be made, though. For example, train at 1/10th the speed for 1/10th of the cost. This could correspond to taking public transport in your analogy, and would bring this within reach of most students.

Well if it used to cost you $1 for 1hr at 1x speed, now it will take you 10hr at 0.1x speed, and if my math checks out $1. You need to shrink the model.

But of course now you run it on your own computer instead of in the DC, which changes the numbers. Especially if your student dorm has a shared electricity bill :)

Re: NanoGPT

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Great news! Cloud instances energy usage is included in their price, and because they're remote and transient it's impossible to permanently damage them.

I think the equivalent of being not careful and getting a dent in this context is to leave it open to the internet and having a bitcoin miner installed.

As you are paying for the resources you use that's fine.

The closest would be if you used some form of software bug to actually cause physical damage, certainly not impossible, but extremely unlikely compared with actually physically damaging a car.

Re: NanoGPT

#217
Doesn't huggingface have dozens of freely available pretrained models like this (including various sized implementations of GPT2) and isn't the source available on most if you wanted to train them yourself?

All I see in the comments is praise for the author as a person, so just wondering what's unique about this that's not available elsewhere? 730 upvotes and counting, assuming I'm missing something...

Re: NanoGPT

#218
post #72

Andrej doesn't need to do this. He's done it because he evidently loves it, and wants to share his hard-earned knowledge with the rest of the world. He may be a product of the ivory tower, but he's been in the trenches . He knows firsthand how f-ing hard it is to ship a product. And here he is, sharing useful personal code with everyone. This github repo now has collected ~4K stars and its antecessor (minGPT) has col…

I’m all for thanking open source contributors, but your excessively prostrating wording is a bit much for me.

[flagged]

Re: NanoGPT

#219

This is really good, and I was really excited by it but then I read: > running on a single 8XA100 40GB node in 38 hours of training This is a $40-80k machine. Not a diss, but I would love to see an advance that would allow anyone with a high end computer to be able to improve on this model. Before that happens this whole field is going to be owned by big corporations.

If GPT-2 / nanoGPT needs this setup, just imagine what GPT3 / chatGPT needs!

Re: NanoGPT

#220
post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if that's a blocker. Ordinary people commonly rent a $40k machine for 38 hours from companies like Avis and Hertz. If training a large model now costs the same as driving to visit grandma, that seems like a pretty good deal.

That's a great comparison. For a real number, I just checked Runpod and you can rent a system with 8xA100 for $17/hr or ~$700 for 38 hours. Not cheap, but also pretty close to the cost of renting a premium vehicle for a few days. I've trained a few small models by renting an 1xA5000 system and that only costs $0.44/hr, which is perfect for learning and experimentation.

The good news is that, unlike vehicles, the rate for rented compute will continue to drop
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