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karpathy
minGPT
Python2020–2026
karpathy / minGPT

minGPT

A minimal PyTorch re-implementation of the OpenAI GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) training

20Distinct people
21Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
25KGitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A minimal PyTorch re-implementation of the OpenAI GPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) training

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use was verified in the last source check.

What people are saying

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Also in these discussions

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This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year21 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2020-08-17 17:32:10 UTC to 2026-04-06 10:15:25 UTC.

024682020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 1 submissions, 1 comments20202021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 6 mentions; 1 submissions, 5 comments2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 8 mentions; 0 submissions, 8 comments20232024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC211
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC615
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC808
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

21 sources
lostmsu·Nov 26, 2025Submission

Tell HN: Karpathy's MinGPT Works on Windows and AMD (Ryzen Max)

I was able to install PyTorch and train Karpathy's minGPT (small) on a Ryzen MAX APU on Windows machine using official instructions: https://rocm.docs.amd.com/en/7.9.0-preview/install/pytorch-comfyui.html ROCm TL;DR; pip install --index-url https://repo.amd.com/rocm/whl/gfx1151/ "rocm[libraries,devel]" hipinfo pip install --index-url https://repo.amd.com/rocm/whl/gfx1151/ torch torchvision torchaudio python -c "import torch; print(torch.cuda.is_available())" Be sure to uninstall torch and torchvision if you had CPU-only versions installed. If you have a different GPU/APU refer to the first link minGPT: https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT
1 points · Open discussion
There are basically no people who have done pre-training of LLMs. What you're describing is absolutely the case, but everyone not in a top 100 AI lab would have never had the displeasure of having to deal with that. That said I strongly suggest everyone follow along with a GPT2 tutorial like: https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT to get a feel for what the big boys have to deal with. Any $100,000 training run can end in failure for no reason what so ever because you just got unlucky with your random seed. If you want something that is both SOTA and cheap: https://huggingface.co/blog/modernbert you can get from pre-training to fine tuning for a couple hundred dollars with a model that is better than anything available to the public. Bert models are so under researched that you legitimately push the state of the art for them on a work station.
Read the rest
Also feel free to drop a line at my profile's address.
In Bitter Lesson is about AI agents
Not a complete answer, but here are the most helpful resources for understanding transformer basics in particular: Original transformer paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.03762 Illustrated transformer: http://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/ Transformer visualization: https://bbycroft.net/llm minGPT (Karpathy): https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT --- Next, some foundational textbooks for general ML and deep learning: Elements of Statistical Learning (aka the bible): https://hastie.su.domains/ElemStatLearn/ Probabilistic ML: https://probml.github.io/pml-book/book2.html Deep Learning Book (Goodfellow/Bengio): https://www.deeplearningbook.org/ Understanding Deep Learning: https://udlbook.github.io/udlbook/ --- Finally, assorted tutorials/resources/intro courses: Beyond the Illustrated Transformer: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?
Read the rest
id=35712334 AI Zero to Hero: https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html AI Canon: https://a16z.com/2023/05/25/ai-canon/ LLM University by Cohere: https://llm.university/ Practical Guide to LLMs: https://github.com/Mooler0410/LLMsPracticalGuide Practical Deep Learning for Coders: https://course.fast.ai/Lessons/part2.html --- Hope that helps!
In Ask HN: Daily practices for building AI/ML skills?
That concept is not the easiest to describe succinctly inside a file like this (or -- while we are completely at it, in a Hacker News post like this!), I think (especially as there are various levels of 'beginner' to take into account here). This is considered a very entry level concept (not as an insult -- simply from an information categorization/tagging perspective here :D :)), and I think there might be others who would consider it to be noise if logged in the code or described in the comments/blogpost. After all, there was a disclaimer that you might have missed up front in the blogpost! "This post assumes familiarity with Python, NumPy, and some basic experience training neural networks." So it is in there! But in all of the firehose of info we get maybe it is not that hard to miss. However, I'm here to help! Thankfully the concept
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is not too terribly difficult, I believe. Effectively, the loss function compresses the task we've described with our labels from our training dataset into our neural network. This includes (ideally, at least), 'all' the information the neural network needs to perform that task well, according to the data we have, at least. If you'd like to know more about the specifics of this, I'd refer you to the original Shannon-Weaver paper on information theory -- Weaver's introduction to the topic is in plain English and accessible to (I believe) nearly anyone off of the street with enough time and energy to think through and parse some of the concepts. Very good stuff! An initial read-through should take no more than half an hour to an hour or so, and should change the way you think about the world if you've not been introduced to the topic before. You can read a scan of the book at a university hosted link here: https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl800/Shannon-We... Using some of the concepts of Shannon's theory, we can see that anything that minimizes an information-theoretic loss function should indeed learn as well those prerequisites to the task at hand (features that identify xyz, features that move information about xyz from place A to B in the neural network, etc). In this case, even though it appears we do not have labels -- we certainly do! We are training on predicting the _next words_ in a sequence, and so thus by consequence humans have already created a very, _very_ richly labeled dataset for free! In this way, getting the data is much easier and the bar to entry for high performance for a neural network is very low -- especially if we want to pivot and 'fine-tune' to other tasks. This is because...to learn the task of predicting the next word, we have to learn tons of other sub-tasks inside of the neural network which overlap with the tasks that we want to perform. And because of the nature of spoken/written language -- to truly perform incredibly well, sometimes we have to learn all of these alternative tasks well enough that little-to-no-finetuning on human-labeled data for this 'secondary' task (for example, question answering) is required! Very cool stuff. This is a very rough introduction, I have not condensed it as much as it could be and certainly, some of the words are more than they should be. But it's an internet comment so this is probably the most I should put into it for now. I hope this helps set you forward a bit on your journey of neural network explanation! :D :D <3 <3 :)))))))))) :fireworks: For reference, I'm interested very much in what I refer to as Kolmogorov-minimal explanations (Wikipedia 'Kolmogorov complexity' once you chew through some of that paper if you're interested! I am still very much a student of it, but it is a fun explanation). In fact (though this repo performs several functions), I made https://github.com/tysam-code/hlb-CIFAR10 as beginner-friendly as possible. One does have to make some decisions to keep verbosity down, and I assume a very basic understand of what's happening in neural networks here too. I have yet to find a good go-to explanation of neural networks as a conceptual intro (I started with Hinton -- love the man but extremely mathematically technical for foundation! D:). Karpathy might have a really good one, I think I saw a zero-to-hero course from him a little while back that seemed really good. Andrej (practically) got me into deep learning via some of his earlier work, and I really love basically everything that I've seen the man put out. I skimmed the first video of his from this series and it seems pretty darn good, I trust his content. You should take a look! (Github and first video: https://github.com/karpathy/nn-zero-to-hero, https://youtu.be/VMj-3S1tku0) For reference, he is the person that's made a lot of cool things recently, including his own minimal GPT (https://github.com/karpathy/minGPT), and the much smaller version of it (https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT). But of course, since we are in this blog post I would refer you to this 60 line numpy GPT first (A. to keep us on track, B. because I skimmed it and it seemed very helpful! I'd recommend taking a look at outside sources if you're feeling particularly voracious in expanding your knowledge here.) I hope this helps give you a solid introduction to the basics of this concept, and/or for anyone else reading this, feel free to let me know if you have any technically (or-otherwise) appropriate questions here, many thanks and much love! <3 <3 <3 <3 :DDDDDDDD :)))))))) :)))) :))))
In A GPT in 60 Lines of NumPy

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