micrograd VS PyO3

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.

Integrating Rust into Python, Edward Wright, 2021-04-12 Examples for making rustpython run actual python code Calling Rust from Python using PyO3 Writing Python inside your Rust code — Part 1, 2020-04-17 RustPython, RustPython Rust for Python developers: Using Rust to optimize your Python code PyO3 (Rust bindings for Python) Musing About Pythonic Design Patterns In Rust, Teddy Rendahl, 2023-07-14

This story unfolds as a captivating journey where the agile Flounder, representing the Python programming language, navigates the vast seas of coding under the wise guidance of Sebastian, symbolizing Rust. Central to their adventure are three powerful tridents: cargo, PyO3, and maturin.

I would not recommend FFI + ctypes. Maintaining the bindings is tedious and error-prone. Also, Rust FFI/unsafe can be tricky even for experienced Rust devs.

Instead PyO3 [1] lets you "write a native Python module in Rust", and it works great. A much better choice IMO.

[1] https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3

Same w/ Rust and Python, this is really neat because now each thread could have a GIL without doing exactly what you said. The pyO3 commit to allow subinterpreters was merged 21 days ago, so this might "just work" today: https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3/pull/3446

I expected someone to write a rust-based scripting language which tightly integrated with rust itself.

In reality, it seems like the python developers and toolchain are embracing rust enough to reduce the benefits to a new alternative.

https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3

Hey HN! I am one of the people working on Bytewax. Bytewax came out of our experience working with ML infrastructure at GitHub. We wanted to use Python because we could move fast, the team was very fluent in it, and the rest of our tooling was Python-native already. We didn't want to introduce JVM-based solutions into our stack because of the lack of experience and the friction we had trying to get Python-centric tooling working with existing solutions like Flink.

In our research, we found Timely Dataflow (https://timelydataflow.github.io/timely-dataflow/, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24837031) and the Naiad project (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/project/naiad/) as well as PyO3 (https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3) and we thought we found a match made in heaven :). Bytewax leverages both of these projects and builds on them to provide a clean API (at least we think so) and table stakes features like connectors, state recovery, and cloud-native scaling. It has been really cool to learn about the dataflow computation model, Rust, and how to wrangle the GIL with Rust and Python :P.

Would love to get your feedback :).

`pip install bytewax` to get started. We have a page of guides (https://www.bytewax.io/guides) with ready-to-run examples.

You can practice your Rust skills by writing performant and/or gluey extensions for higher-level language such as NodeJS (checkout napi-rs) and Python or complementing JS in the browser if you target Webassembly.

For instance, checkout Llama-node https://github.com/Atome-FE/llama-node for an involved Rust-based NodeJS extension. Python has PyO3, a Rust-Python extension toolset: https://github.com/PyO3/pyo3.

They can help you leverage your Rust for writing cool new stuff.