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NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

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Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#211

Post by JimDabell »

satvikpendem wrote: post #193
tehnub wrote: post #107

Interesting exchange on the use of AI coding tools: curious how much did you write the code by hand of it? Karpathy: Good question, it's basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete). I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution. https://x.com/karpathy/status/1977758204139331904

That's funny that the coiner of the term vibe coding has eventually found it not useful anymore.

That’s not what he said. This is the new project:

> My goal is to get the full "strong baseline" stack into one cohesive, minimal, readable, hackable, maximally forkable repo. nanochat will be the capstone project of LLM101n (which is still being developed). I think it also has potential to grow into a research harness, or a benchmark, similar to nanoGPT before it.

This is how he described vibe coding:

> There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

Vibe coding is clearly aimed at having fun hacking around on something that doesn’t matter, and he’s doing the opposite of that with this project. The fact that he’s not using vibe coding for something that is completely inappropriate for vibe coding is neither surprising nor a failure of vibe coding.

Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#213

Post by pixelpoet »

Ono-Sendai wrote: post #205
dinkblam wrote: post #57

from their promotional material: >> Why is the sky blue? > The sky is blue due to an optical illusion called the Rayleigh Scattering Rayleigh Scattering is not an illusion but an effect. > […] particles are made up of tiny blue and violet particles that cause the light to bend in a particular way. ugh. no, there are no "tiny blue" particles in the sky.

not sure why you are being downvoted. That 'explanation' of Rayleigh scattering is just wrong.

Downvoted for being obvious in context / missing the point and getting worked up about it. He even said it's like talking to a kindergartener.

Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#214

Post by tclancy »

notatoad wrote: post #151
SchemaLoad wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everything is unless your app is a React todolist or leatcode questions.

people say this like it's a criticism, but damn is it ever nice to start writing a simple crud form and just have copilot autocomplete the whole thing for me.

People say inbreeding like it’s criticism too.

Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#215

Post by meowface »

trial3 wrote: post #203
meowface wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HN's cynicism towards AI coding (and everything else ever) is exhausting. Karpathy would probably cringe reading this.

okay but he literally does have a bridge that non-deterministically might take you to the wrong place to sell you

The original context of this sub-thread was Karpathy saying how AI coding tools were pretty useless for him when working on this particular project.

Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#216

Post by homeless_engi »

vessenes wrote: post #184
simonw wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got your model working on CPU on macOS by having Claude Code hack away furiously for a while. Here's a script that should work for anyone: https://gist.github.com/simonw/912623bf00d6c13cc0211508969a1... You can run it like this: cd /tmp git clone https://huggingface.co/sdobson/nanochat uv run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/simonw/912623bf00d6c13cc0211508969a100a/raw/80f79c6a6f1e1b5d4485368ef3ddafa5ce853131/gene…

Simon, I had to run "brew install git-lfs && cd nano-chat && git lfs install && git lfs pull" and then it worked. before then, the model weights didn't get cloned by default for me on macOS. % uv run https://gist.githubusercontent.com/simonw/912623bf00d6c13cc0... \ --model-dir nanochat/ --prompt "who is simonw on hacker news?" Using device: cpu Loading model from nanochat/model_000650.pt Loading metadata from nanocha…

Adding on: Claude also gave me the following line which was necessary to get the model weights to download from HF. This might be obvious for anyone familiar with HF but it helped me so sharing here!

git lfs install

Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#217

Post by wordpad »

jwitthuhn wrote: post #181
andrewljohnson wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the shakespeare code tuned a little with different training data does a good job of generating Magic The Gathering commander decks

Somewhat related: I wrote up a MTG card generator based on nanoGPT a while ago that I think produces pretty good results for being 1m parameters. The real neat thing about this is that WotC makes a few thousand new cards each year, so my training data set just grows over time and the model gets better with no effort spent on my part. https://github.com/jlwitthuhn/TCGGPT

It would be interesting to come up with a use case which requires a freshly trained model and isn't just something that generic models can already, especially with 1MM context window

Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#218

Post by wordpad »

dingnuts wrote: post #87
levocardia wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a Stephen Boyd quote that's something like "if your optimization problem is too computationally expensive, just go on vacation to Greece for a few weeks and by the time you get back, computers might be fast enough to solve it." With LLMs there's sort of an equivalent situation with cost: how mindblowing would it be able to train this kind of LLM at all even just 4 years ago? And today you can get a kindergart…

> today you can get a kindergartener level chat model for about $100. Not hard to imagine the same model costing $10 of compute in a few years. No, it's extremely hard to imagine since I used one of Karpathy's own models to have a basic chat bot like six years ago. Yes, it spoke nonsense; so did my GPT-2 fine tune four years ago and so does this. And so does ChatGPT Improvement is linear at best. I still think it's a…

Even with linear progression of model capability, the curve for model usefulness could be exponential, especially if we consider model cost which will come down.

For every little bit a model a smarter and more accurate there are exponentially more real world tasks it could be used for.

Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#219

Post by krackers »

SeanAnderson wrote: post #128
tehnub wrote: post #107

Interesting exchange on the use of AI coding tools: curious how much did you write the code by hand of it? Karpathy: Good question, it's basically entirely hand-written (with tab autocomplete). I tried to use claude/codex agents a few times but they just didn't work well enough at all and net unhelpful, possibly the repo is too far off the data distribution. https://x.com/karpathy/status/1977758204139331904

This makes sense, right? It's a relatively novel thing to be writing. I don't find it to be a damning remark like other comments here seem to be concluding. If anything, the fact that Karpathy reached towards Claude/Codex in an attempt to gain value is indicative that, in previous coding efforts, those tools were helpful to him.

It's not _that_ far off distribution though. The math and concepts are well understood.

Re: NanoChat – The best ChatGPT that $100 can buy

#220

Post by wordpad »

contingencies wrote: post #65
karimf wrote: post #4

I've always thought about the best way to contribute to humanity: number of people you help x how much you help them. I think what Karpathy is doing is one of the highest leverage ways to achieve that. Our current world is build on top of open source projects. This is possible because there are a lot of free resources to learn to code so anyone from anywhere in the world can learn and make a great piece of software.…

While documenting a build path is nice, IMHO renting hardware nobody can afford from VC-backed cloud providers using cold hard cash to produce clones of legacy tech using toy datasets under the guise of education is propping up the AI bubble and primarily helping institutional shareholders in those AI bubble companies, particularly their hardware supplier NVidia. Personally I do not see this as helping people or huma…

Tinkering with something is what inspires next generation of innovators, in this space or another.

Think back to your first experience with tech, something you just erenstly thought was cool...

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