minGPT VS nanoGPT

minGPT (Karpathy): https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT

Next, some foundational textbooks for general ML and deep learning:

Language Model novice here. I was going through the README section of minGPT and read this line.

The first network displayed with working weights is a tiny such network, which sorts a small list of the letters A, B, and C. This is the demo example model from Andrej Karpathy's minGPT implementation.

Tried it once. Its promise is to take the dataset's seasonal trend into account, which makes sense for Facebook's original use case.

We ran it on such a dataset and found out that directly using https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT consistently gives a better result. So we ended up using the output of Prophet as an input feature to a neural network, but the result was not improved in any significant way.

Sure, im trying to regenerate a bunch of complex numbers based on their absolute value. So im trying to embed these absolute values and then using gpt model(probably mini gpt) try to recover the original comples numbers. There is a certain connection between these complex numbers and their order which im not capable of explaining yet. Im hoping the model would be capable of recognizing certain sequences of these absolute values and match them with the desired complex counterparts (by training the model).

minGPT (https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT)

Check out minGPT and nanoGPT from Karpathy, he puts out some of the best machine learning tutorials and teaching content.

Where can I get access to one? Rent or perhaps somebody who has access can give me a temporary access to theirs. All I want to do is try to run https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT , see if it works and what the performance is like.

Nice work! I built something similar years ago and I did compile the probabilities based on a corpus of text (public domain books) in an attempt to produce writing in the style of various authors. The results were actually quite similar to the output of nanoGPT[0]. It was very unoptimized and everything was kept in memory. I also knew nothing about embeddings at the time and only a little about NLP techniques that would certainly have helped. Using a graph database would have probably been better than the datastructure I came up with at the time. You should look into stuff like Datalog, Tries[1], and N-Triples[2] for more inspiration.

You're idea of splitting the probabilities based on whether you're starting the sentence or finishing it is interesting but you might be able to benefit from an approach that creates a "window" of text you can use for lookup, using an LCS[3] algorithm could do that. There's probably a lot of optimization you could do based on the probabilities of different sequences, I think this was the fundamental thing I was exploring in my project.

Seeing this has inspired me further to consider working on that project again at some point.

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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trie

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N-Triples

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_common_subsequence

where x1 denotes the 1st token, x2 denotes the 2nd token and so on, respectively.

I understand the conditional terms p(x_n|...) where we use cross-entropy to calculate their losses. However, I'm unsure about the probability of the very first token p(x1). How is it calculated? Is it in some configurations of the training process, or in the model architecture, or in the loss function?

IMHO, if the model doesn't learn p(x1) properly, the entire formula for Bayes' rule cannot be completed, and we can't refer to LLMs as "truly generative". Am I missing something here?

I asked the same question on nanoGPT repo: https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT/issues/432, but I haven't found the answer I'm looking for yet. Could someone please enlighten me.

This repo, albeit "old" in regards to how much progress there's been in LLMs, has great simple tutorials right there eg. fine-tuning GPT2 with Shakespeare: https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT

For training from scratch, maybe a small model like https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT or tinyllama. Perhaps with quantization.

It does remind me of a project [1] Andrej Karpathy did, writing a neural network and training code in ~600 lines (although networks have easier logic to code than a compiler).

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

But I'm still not convinced that it can't in theory. Maybe the training set or transformer size I'm using is too small. I'm using nanoGPT implementation (https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT) with layers 24, heads 12, and embeddings per head 32. I'm using character-based vocab: every digit is a separate token, +, = and EOL.

https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT/blob/f08abb45bd2285627d1...

At training time, probabilities for the next token are computed for each position, so if we feed in a sequence of n tokens, we basically get n training examples, one for each position, but at inference time, we only compute the next token since we’ve already output the preceding ones.

And there are a bunch of other efforts at making training more efficient. Here's a cool model by Karpathy (OpenAI/used to head up Tesla's efforts): https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT

Just being a part of any auto-regressive system does not contradict his statement.

Go look at the GPT training code, here is the exact line: https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT/blob/master/train.py#L12...

The model is only trained to predict the next token. The training regime is purely next-token prediction. There is no loopiness whatsoever here, strange or ordinary.

Just because you take that feedforward neural network and wrap it in a loop to feed it its own output does not change the architecture of the neural net itself. The neural network was trained in one direction and runs in one direction. Hofstadter is surprised that such an architecture yields something that looks like intelligence.

He specifically used the correct term "feedforward" to constrast with recurrent neural networks, which GPT is not: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feedforward_neural_network

Does anyone have or know of an example implementation in plain pytorch, not huggingface transformers. Like something you could plug into https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT ?