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Microgpt

karpathy.github.io

91–100 of 354 posts

Re: Microgpt

#92
post #71
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans need way less data. Just compare Waymo to average 16 year-old with car.

A 16 year old has been training for almost 16 years to drive a car. I would argue the opposite: Waymo’s / Specific AIs need far less data than humans. Humans can generalize their training, but they definitely need a LOT of training!

When humans, or dogs or cats for that matter, react to novel situations they encounter, when they appear to generalize or synthesize prior diverse experience into a novel reaction, that new experience and new reaction feeds directly back into their mental model and alters it on the fly. It doesn't just tack on a new memory. New experience and new information back-propagates constantly adjusting the weights and meanings of prior memories. This is a more multi-dimensional alteration than simply re-training a model to come up with a new right answer... it also exposes to the human mental model all the potential flaws in all the previous answers which may have been sufficiently correct before.

This is why, for example, a 30 year old can lose control of a car on an icy road and then suddenly, in the span of half a second before crashing, remember a time they intentionally drifted a car on the street when they were 16 and reflect on how stupid they were. In the human or animal mental model, all events are recalled by other things, and all are constantly adapting, even adapting past things.

The tokens we take in and process are not words, nor spatial artifacts. We read a whole model as a token, and our output is a vector of weighted models that we somewhat trust and somewhat discard. Meeting a new person, you will compare all their apparent models to the ones you know: Facial models, audio models, language models, political models. You ingest their vector of models as tokens and attempt to compare them to your own existing ones, while updating yours at the same time. Only once our thoughts have arranged those competing models we hold in some kind of hierarchy do we poll those models for which ones are appropriate to synthesize words or actions from.

Re: Microgpt

#93
Hoenikker had been experimenting with melting and re-freezing ice-nine in the kitchen of his Cape Cod home.

Beautiful, perhaps like ice-nine is beautiful.

Re: Microgpt

#94
Someone has modified microgpt to build a tiny GPT that generates Korean first names, and created a web page that visualizes the entire process [1].

Users can interactively explore the microgpt pipeline end to end, from tokenization until inference.

[1] English GPT lab:

https://ko-microgpt.vercel.app/

Re: Microgpt

#95
Super useful exercise. My gut tells me that someone will soon figure out how to build micro-LLMs for specialized tasks that have real-world value, and then training LLMs won’t just be for billion dollar companies. Imagine, for example, a hyper-focused model for a specific programming framework (e.g. Laravel, Django, NextJS) trained only on open-source repositories and documentation and carefully optimized with a specialized harness for one task only: writing code for that framework (perhaps in tandem with a commodity frontier model). Could a single programmer or a small team on a household budget afford to train a model that works better/faster than OpenAI/Anthropic/DeepSeek for specialized tasks? My gut tells me this is possible; and I have a feeling that this will become mainstream, and then custom model training becomes the new “software development”.

Re: Microgpt

#96

Super useful exercise. My gut tells me that someone will soon figure out how to build micro-LLMs for specialized tasks that have real-world value, and then training LLMs won’t just be for billion dollar companies. Imagine, for example, a hyper-focused model for a specific programming framework (e.g. Laravel, Django, NextJS) trained only on open-source repositories and documentation and carefully optimized with a spec…

If we can run them on commodity hardware with cpus, nothing like it

Re: Microgpt

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1000 lines?? What is going on in this thread

Ok 200 lines. Don’t know how I ended up typing 1000.

I've taken the liberty of editing your GP comment in the hope that we can cut down on offtopicness.

The other "1000 comments" accounts, we banned as likely genai.

Re: Microgpt

#99
post #37
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where is this 1000 lines of C coming from? This is python.

Firsthand evidence of AI bot accounts posting slop on here/astroturfing I suppose.

Makes you wonder what's the point of reading these threads at all. Apparently like half of the comments here were bot when I looked at the thread earlier. Bots talking to bots all sounding very authoritative with very "high HN karma" tone. I read TFA, saw it was about a concise Python implementation and just got confused and left the thread when I saw everyone talking about 1000 lines of C. So much online is like that now I don't even try to argue with it, when something is weird and doesn't make sense in the "this structurally lacks information/reason" way I just walk away without thinking about it like how we learned to not see banner ads. It's sad to see HN joining that category.

What I don't understand is why 1000 lines of C? Were the bots somehow just going off the title "Microgpt" alone? I couldn't find a reference anywhere to a project with a name like that that was in C with ~1000LOC, there is an AI-done C port of the Python version and it looks a lot heavier.

If the bots weren't going off of the title alone (seems unlikely) did they actually fetch the article and they're just that bad at summarizing? The first sentence has "200 lines of pure Python" in it. Maybe these bots are wired up to really lousy models? But the writing is good enough. Honestly not sure why I even care.

Re: Microgpt

#100

Super useful exercise. My gut tells me that someone will soon figure out how to build micro-LLMs for specialized tasks that have real-world value, and then training LLMs won’t just be for billion dollar companies. Imagine, for example, a hyper-focused model for a specific programming framework (e.g. Laravel, Django, NextJS) trained only on open-source repositories and documentation and carefully optimized with a spec…

This is possible but not for training but fine-tuning the existing open source models.

This can be mainstream, and then custom model fine-tuning becomes the new “software development”.

Please check out this new fine-tuning method for LLM by MIT and ETH Zurich teams that used a single NVIDIA H200 GPU [1], [2], [3].

Full fine-tuning of the entire model’s parameters were performed based on the Hugging Face TRL library.

[1] MIT's new fine-tuning method lets LLMs learn new skills without losing old ones (news):

https://venturebeat.com/orchestration/mits-new-fine-tuning-m...

[2] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning (paper):

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.19897

[3] Self-Distillation Enables Continual Learning (code):

https://self-distillation.github.io/SDFT.html

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