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micrograd
A tiny scalar-valued autograd engine and a neural net library on top of it with PyTorch-like API
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
> Instead, it turns out a few hundred lines of Python is genuinely enough to train a basic version!
actually its not just a basic version. Llama 1/2's model.py is 500 lines: https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/blob/main/llama/mo...
Mistral (is rumored to have) forked llama and is 369 lines: https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-src/blob/main/mistral/m...
and both of these are SOTA open source models.
> Instead, it turns out a few hundred lines of Python is genuinely enough to train a basic version!
actually its not just a basic version. Llama 1/2's model.py is 500 lines: https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/blob/main/llama/mo...
Mistral (is rumored to have) forked llama and is 369 lines: https://github.com/mistralai/mistral-src/blob/main/mistral/m...
and both of these are SOTA open source models.
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