micrograd VS NNfSiX

I recently decided to turbo-teach myself basic cuda with a proper project. I really enjoyed Karpathy’s micrograd (https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd), so I extended it with cuda kernels and 2D tensor logic. It’s a bit longer than the original project, but it’s still very readable for anyone wanting to quickly learn about gpu acceleration in practice.

FOr inference, less than 1KLOC of pure, dependency-free C is enough (if you include the tokenizer and command line parsing)[1]. This was a non-obvious fact for me, in principle, you could run a modern LLM 20 years ago with just 1000 lines of code, assuming you're fine with things potentially taking days to run of course.

Training wouldn't be that much harder, Micrograd[2] is 200LOC of pure Python, 1000 lines would probably be enough for training an (extremely slow) LLM. By "extremely slow", I mean that a training run that normally takes hours could probably take dozens of years, but the results would, in principle, be the same.

If you were writing in C instead of Python and used something like Llama CPP's optimization tricks, you could probably get somewhat acceptable training performance in 2 or 3 KLOC. You'd still be off by one or two orders of magnitude when compared to a GPU cluster, but a lot better than naive, loopy Python.

[1] https://github.com/karpathy/llama2.c

[2] https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd

Perhaps they were thinking of https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd

I was (for fun) trying to recreate micrograd in Haskell. The ideia is simple:

Check out this repo I found a few years back when I was looking into understanding pytorch better. It's basically a super tiny autodiff library that only works on scalars. The whole repo is under 200 lines of code, so you can pull up pycharm or whatever and step through the code and see how it all comes together. Or... you know. Just read it, it's not super complicated.

I'm doing an ML apprenticeship [1] these weeks and Karpathy's videos are part of it. We've been deep down into them. I found them excellent. All concepts he illustrates are crystal clear in his mind (even though they are complicated concepts themselves) and that shows in his explanations.

Also, the way he builds up everything is magnificent. Starting from basic python classes, to derivatives and gradient descent, to micrograd [2] and then from a bigram counting model [3] to makemore [4] and nanoGPT [5]

[1]: https://www.foundersandcoders.com/ml

[2]: https://github.com/karpathy/micrograd

[3]: https://github.com/karpathy/randomfun/blob/master/lectures/m...

[4]: https://github.com/karpathy/makemore

[5]: https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT

Just published my first crate, rustygrad, a Rust implementation of Andrej Karpathy's micrograd!

I've been trying to reimplement Karpathy's micrograd library in rust as a fun side project.

I've been rather enjoying "Neural Networks from Scratch" (https://nnfs.io/)

I haven't gotten super deep into it yet, but https://nnfs.io/ has been good in my opinion. The book slowly replaces written and explained code with numpy equivalents to keep the examples fast. Plus the accompanying animations are also useful. I would be curious what others think on it too.

For those curious to writing "gradient descent with respect to some loss function" starting from an empty .py file (and a numpy import, sure), can't recommend enough Harrison "sentdex" Kinsley's videos/book Neural Networks from Scratch in Python [1].

[1] https://youtu.be/Wo5dMEP_BbI?list=PLQVvvaa0QuDcjD5BAw2DxE6OF... https://nnfs.io

Not sure if foundational (quite a tall order in such a fast-moving field), but for sure a nice introduction into neural networks, and even mathematics in general (because it's nice to see numbers in action beyond school-level algebra):

Harrison Kinsley, Daniel Kukiela, Neural Networks from Scratch, https://nnfs.io, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wo5dMEP_BbI&list=PLQVvvaa0Qu...

Have you had a look at https://nnfs.io/ ? I bought the book and am gearing up to start working through it, I would be interested to know your thoughts. Generally I want to chart a personal curriculum from data engineer to practical application of modern AI to real business problems.

You can check out Neural Networks from Scratch in Python for an introduction to neural networks, which can be used for image classification. Please be forewarned that you'll need the mathematics necessary to read through this book - however, I'm assuming that since you've selected writing such an algorithm(s) in Python for your final school project that you're aware of such.

I am planning on working my way through Neural Networks From Scratch (https://nnfs.io/) in a few months just to build my understanding. After that I'm hoping to be able to figure out the best path for a couple of projects I have in mind.