tacit/nanochat
1
0
Fork 0
mirror of https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat.git synced 2026-01-20 10:23:42 +00:00
Code Issues Actions Packages Projects Releases Wiki Activity

tweaks to readme a bit

Browse Source
This commit is contained in:
Andrej Karpathy 2026-01-17 02:28:31 +00:00
parent 1933e85046
commit 6460dc6382
1 changed files with 8 additions and 13 deletions
Show Stats Download Patch File Download Diff File Expand all files Collapse all files

21
README.md
View File

@ -6,14 +6,15 @@
This repo is a full-stack implementation of an LLM like ChatGPT in a single, clean, minimal, hackable, dependency-lite codebase. nanochat is designed to run on a single 8XH100 node via scripts like [speedrun.sh](speedrun.sh), that run the entire pipeline start to end. This includes tokenization, pretraining, finetuning, evaluation, inference, and web serving over a simple UI so that you can talk to your own LLM just like ChatGPT. nanochat will become the capstone project of the course LLM101n being developed by Eureka Labs.
## Updates
- (Jan 16 2026) The repo is in active development, I am currently fleshing out the pretraining stage.
- (Jan 7 2026) See new post: [nanochat Miniseries v1](https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat/discussions/420) and the associated script [miniseries.sh](miniseries.sh).
## Talk to it
To get a sense of the endpoint of this repo, you can currently find [nanochat d34](https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat/discussions/314) hosted on [nanochat.karpathy.ai](https://nanochat.karpathy.ai/). "d34" means that this model has 34 layers in the Transformer neural network. This model has 2.2 billion parameters, it was trained on 88 billion tokens by simply running the training script [run1000.sh](run1000.sh) with `--target_param_data_ratio=40` (2x longer than Chinchilla-optimal), and the total cost of training was ~$2,500 (about 100 hours training time on 8XH100 GPU node). While today this is enough to outperform GPT-2 of 2019, it falls dramatically short of modern Large Language Models like GPT-5. When talking to these micro models, you'll see that they make a lot of mistakes, they are a little bit naive and silly and they hallucinate a ton, a bit like children. It's kind of amusing. But what makes nanochat unique is that it is fully yours - fully configurable, tweakable, hackable, and trained by you from start to end. To train and talk to your own, we turn to...
## Updates
- (Jan 7 2026) See new post: [nanochat Miniseries v1](https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat/discussions/420) and the associated script [miniseries.sh](miniseries.sh).
## Quick start
The fastest way to feel the magic is to run the speedrun script [speedrun.sh](speedrun.sh), which trains and inferences the $100 tier of nanochat. On an 8XH100 node at $24/hr, this gives a total run time of about 4 hours. Boot up a new 8XH100 GPU box from your favorite provider (e.g. I use and like [Lambda](https://lambda.ai/service/gpu-cloud)), and kick off the training script:
@ -99,7 +100,7 @@ And a bit more about computing environments that will run nanochat:
## Running on CPU / MPS
nanochat can be run on CPU or on MPS (if you're on Macbook), and will automatically try to detect what device is best to run on. You're not going to get too far without GPUs, but at least you'll be able to run the code paths and maybe train a tiny LLM with some patience. For an example of how to make all the run commands much smaller (feel free to tune!), you can refer to [dev/runcpu.sh](dev/runcpu.sh) file. You'll see that I'm essentially restricting all scripts to train smaller models, to run for shorter number of iterations, etc. This functionality is new, slightly gnarly (touched a lot of code), and was merged in this [CPU|MPS PR](https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat/pull/88) on Oct 21, 2025.
nanochat can be run on CPU or on MPS (if you're on Macbook) in principle, and will automatically try to detect what device is best to run on. The script [dev/runcpu.sh](dev/runcpu.sh) shows a very simple example that will exercise the code paths but basically produce garbage results. Unless you know what you're doing, I basically don't recommend using this script right now and hope to tune it a bit more in the future.
## Customization
@ -109,15 +110,9 @@ Additionally, to add new abilities to nanochat, see [Guide: counting r in strawb
## Questions
nanochat is designed to be short and sweet. One big advantage of this is that we can package up all of the files together and copy paste them to your favorite LLM to ask arbitrary questions. As an example, I like to package up the repo using the [files-to-prompt](https://github.com/simonw/files-to-prompt) utility like so:
I recommend using [DeepWiki](https://deepwiki.com/karpathy/nanochat) from Devin/Cognition to ask questions of this repo. In the URL of this repo, simply change github.com to deepwiki.com, and you're off.
```bash
files-to-prompt . -e py -e md -e html -e toml -e sh --cxml > packaged.txt
```
This includes all py, html, toml, sh files and chooses the cxml output format. Everything is written to the `packaged.txt` file, which atm measures ~330KB (i.e. well below ~100K tokens for a state of the art LLM), and ~8K lines of code in 45 files.
Alternatively, I recommend using [DeepWiki](https://deepwiki.com/karpathy/nanochat) from Devin/Cognition to ask questions of this repo. In the URL of this repo, simply change github.com to deepwiki.com, and you're off.
You can also come to the [#nanochat Discord channel](https://discord.com/channels/1020383067459821711/1427295580895314031) to ask questions, or use the Discussions.
## Tests