Life & fun · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to Flash Attention in ~100 lines of CUDA
Flash Attention in ~100 lines of CUDA (forward pass only) - tspeterkim/flash-attention-minimal
Flash Attention is a CUDA implementation that optimizes attention mechanisms in machine learning models through a streamlined, minimal codebase of roughly 100 lines. It targets developers and researchers working with… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Flash Attention in ~100 lines of CUDA launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.
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Hi HN! I'm just sharing a project I've been working on during the LLM Efficiency Challenge - you can now finetune Llama with QLoRA 5x faster than Huggingface's original implementation on your own local GPU. Some highlights: 1. Manual autograd engine - hand derived backprop steps. 2. QLoRA / LoRA 80% faster, 50% less memory. 3. All kernels written in OpenAI's Triton language. 4. 0% loss in accuracy - no approximation methods - all exact. 5. No change of hardware necessary. Supports NVIDIA GPUs since 2018+. CUDA 7.5+. 6. Flash Attention support via Xformers. 7. Supports 4bit and 16bit…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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DeepSeek-V4▲387The open-source era of 1M context intelligence
Apr 2026 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
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Continual learning model trained from scratch on 8GB VRAM laptop with batch-1 stream of data. - volotat/mini-AGI
Sep 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Build your own high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA - a smaller version of vLLM - jmaczan/tiny-vllm
May 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Thinc is a lightweight type-checked deep learning library for composing models, with support for layers defined in frameworks like PyTorch and TensorFlow.
2020 · thinc.ai · its alternatives →
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Long-context efficiency with DeepSeek Sparse Attention
2025 · huggingface.co · its alternatives →
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I ported Microsoft's TRELLIS.2 (4B parameter image-to-3D model) to run on Apple Silicon via PyTorch MPS. The original requires CUDA with flash_attn, nvdiffrast, and custom sparse convolution kernels: none of which work on Mac. I replaced the CUDA-specific ops with pure-PyTorch alternatives: a gather-scatter sparse 3D convolution, SDPA attention for sparse transformers, and a Python-based mesh extraction replacing CUDA hashmap operations. Total changes are a few hundred lines across 9 files. Generates ~400K vertex meshes from single photos in about 3.5 minutes on M4 Pro (24GB). Not as fast as…
Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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2020 · memordo.com · its alternatives →
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I previously posted this a month and a half ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45876742 I have rewritten it to be much more simple, from 951 lines of code to just 364, with no loss in core functionality or generation quality. I also added a tiny GPT implementation as a comparison (inspired by Andrej Karpathy's code). The two model implementations are ~80% identical, with the core differences being the generate and get_batch functions. The model architecture, training loop, etc, differ in only 19 lines of code. Trained weights are included, so you can just clone and run…
Nov 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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This is a vector index I built that supports insertion and k-nearest neighbors (k-NN) querying, optimized for GPUs. It operates entirely in CUDA and can process queries on half a billion vectors in under 200 milliseconds. The codebase is structured as a standalone library with an HTTP API for remote access. It’s intended for high-performance search tasks—think similarity search, AI model retrieval, or reinforcement learning replay buffers. The codebase is located at https://github.com/rodlaf/BinaryGPUIndex.
2025 · rlafuente.com · its alternatives →
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RightNow CLI▲121I locked in for 18 hours and built Claude Code for CUDA. It is completely open source! It writes CUDA kernels, debugs memory issues, and optimizes for your specific GPU. It is a fully agentic AI with tool calling built specifically for the CUDA toolkit This is the CLI version of RightNow AI code editor, our GPU-native code editor with a built-in emulator, visual profiling, and remote GPU access. The CLI is open source, lightweight, and fast. It is designed for anyone who wants AI help with CUDA without setup I used Python because it is the most common language, so anyone can build on top of…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Absolute minimalistic implementation of a GPT-like transformer using only numpy (<650 lines). - joennlae/tensorli
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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2016 · erkaman.github.io · its alternatives →
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Train a tiny GPT in under a minute (CUDA only). Contribute to lostmsu/TurboGPT development by creating an account on GitHub.
24d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
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A single / multi layer / recurrent neural network written in Golang. - made2591/go-perceptron-go
2017 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A tiny version of GPT fully implemented in Python with zero dependencies - isaacperez/tinygpt
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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It's our new text-to-image model: a 9.3B single-stream diffusion transformer trained entirely from scratch. We focused heavily on controllability through structured JSON prompts, with strong text rendering, spatial awareness through bounding box guidance, and color palette control. It has the best text rendering of any open-weight model we've tested so far, and the NF4 quantized checkpoint runs on a single 24GB GPU. For more technical details and examples see our blog post: https://ideogram.ai/blog/ideogram-4.0/ We will be happy to answer any questions :)
Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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A langgraph based workflow with a C++ CUDA suite to optimize CUDA kernels - bertaye/agentic-cuda-optimizer
29d ago · github.com · its alternatives →
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I saw a tweet that tinygrad is so good that you could make a graphics library that wraps tg. So I’ve been hacking on a gtinygrad, and honestly it convinced me it could be used for legit research. The JIT + tensor model ends up being a really nice way to express light transport all in simple python, so I reimplemented some new research papers from SIGGRAPH like REstir PG and SZ and it just works. instead of complicated cpp its just a 200 LOC of python.
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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After the incredible response to our launch of the first online CUDA playground, we have just shipped something we think all you GPU programming and ML enthusiasts will love. Introducing LeetGPU Challenges--the place to compete on writing the fastest CUDA kernels. We have problems like matrix multiplication, agent simulation, multi-head self-attention, with more dropping every couple of days! We have a lot of really cool things coming up, including support for PyTorch, TensorFlow, JAX, TinyGrad; Multi-GPU programs; H100, V100, A100 GPU options Give it a try and let us know what you think!
2025 · leetgpu.com · its alternatives →
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Minimal, readable LLM post-training experiments on one 8GB GPU. Measures forgetting, seed variance, and RL emergence. - pochenai/nano-llm-posttraining
Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Also compare
- 80% faster, 50% less memory, 0% loss of accuracy Llama finetuning alternatives
- DeepSeek-V4 alternatives
- Mini-AGI – Dynamic continual learning model trained on 8GB VRAM alternatives
- Tiny-vLLM – high performance LLM inference engine in C++ and CUDA alternatives
- RightNow AI 'V2.0' alternatives
- Thinc, a new deep learning library by the makers of spaCy and FastAPI alternatives
Ranked by how close each launch is in meaning, then by votes. Prices were read from each product’s own site when checked and can change. Refine with your own description →