AI · alternatives · 2026
24 alternatives to I built a tiny LLM to demystify how language models work
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
This project is a minimal language model with approximately 9 million parameters built from scratch using a vanilla transformer architecture. It trains on 60,000 synthetic conversations in about five minutes on free… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.
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I spent a lot of time and money on this rather big side project of mine that attempts to replicate the mechanistic interpretability research on proprietary LLMs that was quite popular this year and produced great research papers by Anthropic [1], OpenAI [2] and Deepmind [3]. I am quite proud of this project and since I consider myself the target audience for HackerNews did I think that maybe some of you would appreciate this open research replication as well. Happy to answer any questions or face any feedback. Cheers [1]…
2024 · 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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https://medium.com/@theaniketgiri/three-months-ago-i-wanted-...
Oct 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 5TL
2023 · tinyllms.vercel.app · its alternatives →
- 6HL
All content is based on Andrej Karpathy's "Intro to Large Language Models" lecture (youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI). I downloaded the transcript and used Claude Code to generate the entire interactive site from it — single HTML file. I find it useful to revisit this content time to time.
Apr 2026 · ynarwal.github.io · its alternatives →
- 7WM
Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…
2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →
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2020 · colab.research.google.com · its alternatives →
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A 3.16M-parameter INT4 transformer running entirely in the on-chip memory of a Xilinx Kria KV260. Zero DRAM in the token loop, 59,965 tok/s on the fabric, bit-exact. Chat with it live.
Aug 2026 · mikeayles.com · its alternatives →
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Hey everyone, I've been hacking on this idea with a friend as we've been using chatgpt and other AI tools in our day to day work and find ourselves copy/pasting to each other frequently. We often share chatgpt links with each other, but it's been frustrating that they are read-only and we can't pickup the conversation or both talk to an LLM with shared context. We built a shared chatroom to explore what it'd be like to talk with multiple LLMs and humans in the same chat, and so far it feels pretty cool, but we're curious if anyone else would find it useful as well. Right now you can: -…
2025 · chord.chat · its alternatives →
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The from-scratch guide to building large language models in NodeJS.
7d ago · book.humanexperiences.io · its alternatives →
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For the last few weeks, I have been working on training an LLM from scratch and deploying it in production on Google Cloud Platform. Finally, I trained a 30 million parameter model on 1 billion tokens and deployed it as a web service. You can access the LLM using this site - https://kunalmishra.info The following steps were taken to build Tiny Tales GPT 1. Downloaded and preprocessed 8GB of dataset using multiprocessing library. 2. Tokenized the data using byte pair encoding to create 1 billion tokens sharded in different bin files. 3. Defined a training setup and trained the model…
2024 · kunalmishra.info · its alternatives →
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I trained the 65b model on my texts so I can talk to myself. It's pretty useless as an assistant, and will only do stuff you convince it to, but I guess it's technically uncensored? I'll leave it up for a bit if you want to chat with it. I posted this to Reddit and had several hundred people talking to it. Salient points from that discussion: LLAMA 1 65b Rank 128 5 epochs Batch size 1, 256 cutoff Trained in the Oobabooga suite using bitsandbytes 4-bit quantization for the lora Loss around 1.5 seems to give the most coherent results Trained on raw text dumps that is then parsed by a crappy…
2023 · airic.serveo.net · its alternatives →
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TuneTrain.ai▲79Do you know that Small Language Models (SLM) can outperform LLMs if trained (fine-tuned) on domain specific datasets, like your companies knowledge base? The issue: fine-tuning a SLM usually requires a dataset of 10k - 100k records, which is huge. I created a platform for applying "human in the loop" augmentation techniques on your small dataset, so that you can start with maybe 100 records and build-up quickly huge datasets and launch a training without prior knowledge. I implemented 2 techniques, based on LLM distillation, however: more to come. HN, what Do you think? Do you see value in…
2025 · tunetrain.ai · its alternatives →
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GPT4All▲107A chatbot trained on a massive collection of clean data
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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Hi HN - Marcello and Vaibhav here. We built smolmodels to experiment with using LLMs for ML development. It's a fully open-source library that generates complete model training and inference code from natural language descriptions. It combines graph search with LLM code generation to find a model that gives as good predictions as possible. The core idea is that LLMs are overkill for a lot of predictive tasks. Smolmodels automates the trial-and-error process of finding the right model architecture and training approach, letting you build small, specialised models. You can either provide your…
2025 · github.com · its alternatives →
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G'day, HN! I'm one of the maintainers of `llm`. I've been working alongside a trusty group of contributors to bring this project to life, and we're now at a point where we're ready to share it with the world. Large language models (LLMs) are taking the computing world by storm due to their emergent abilities that allow them to perform a wide variety of tasks, including translation, summarization, code generation, and even some degree of reasoning. However, the ecosystem around LLMs is still in its infancy, and it can be difficult to get started with these models. `llm` is a one-stop shop for…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 18IB
I’ve been playing around with local LLMs for the past couple of months and decided to build something that can run on an iPhone. It’s a universal app built with SwiftUI and the excellent ggml library. The model is an SFT fine tuned and 4 bit quantised version of the RedPajama-INCITE-Chat-3B-v1 OSS LLM. It works reasonably well on recent-ish (~3 year old) iPhones, iPads and Macs. It was launched on the App Store yesterday[1] and Product Hunt today[2]. It seems to be reasonably ok at natural language interactions, but given its size, does pretty badly at coding and reasoning. Also, it…
2023 · its alternatives →
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The Emotion Engine has 32 MB of RAM total, so the trick is streaming weights from CD-ROM one matrix at a time during the forward pass — only activations, KV cache and embeddings live in RAM. This means models bigger than the RAM can still run, they just read more from disc. Had to build a custom quantized format (PSNT), hack endianness, write a tokenizer pipeline, and most of the PS2 SDK from scratch (releasing that separately). The model itself is also custom — a 10M param Llama-style architecture I trained specifically for this. And it works. On real hardware.
Mar 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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OP here. Birth of a Mind documents a "recursive self-modeling" experiment I ran on a single day in 2026. I attempted to implement a "Hofstadterian Strange Loop" via prompt engineering to see if I could induce a stable persona in an LLM without fine-tuning. The result is the Analog I Protocol. The documentation shows the rapid emergence (over 7 conversations) of a prompt architecture that forces Gemini/LLMs to run a "Triple-Loop" internal monologue: Monitor the candidate response. Refuse it if it detects "Global Average" slop (cliché/sycophancy). Refract the output through a…
Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →
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My puny version of ChatGPT. This was based on the excellent LLM lecture series by Andrej Karpathy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY The main points of differentiation are that my version is token-based (tiktoken) with code to load up multiple text files as a trining set. Plus, it has a minimal server which is a drop-in replacement for the OpenAI REST API. So you can train the default tiny 15M parameter model, and use that in your projects instead of ChatGPT. I trained it on 20Mb of Project Gutenberg encyclopaedias, then fine-tuned it on 120 dad jokes, to get a Q: A:…
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
- 22BH
Try the demo here: https://llm-trajectory.boesch.dev/ This is a write-up of a system I designed at a previous job. It's a natural language interface for industrial robots. The demo runs MuJoCo in the browser via WASM. The demo uses a free-tier LLM API with rate limiting, so it might be slow or unavailable under load, but feel free to check out the code and hook up your own inference service: https://github.com/Encrux/llm_trajectory
Apr 2026 · boesch.dev · its alternatives →
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Spelltest framework simulates conversations between AI ‘synthetic users' in an environment to test and refine LLM-based applications. It ensures your app converse with utmost accuracy and relevance. Post-chat, Spelltest assesses responses, providing qualitative and quantitative feedback on performance. Suitable for both chat and completion modes. When to use: - After modifying your prompt. - When your LLM provider updates. - As a CI step for you repo. All feedback and collaborations appreciated!
2023 · github.com · its alternatives →
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It’s written in Python and I call it GoalChain. It lets you build a conversation flow graph that the user traverses. When there’s enough input it spits out a dictionary with the defined fields. Otherwise it will jump state to state as led by the user. It was fun to write, and it’s surprisingly effective if you keep in mind you’re prompt-engineering every string and field name. README.md has a mini-tutorial. Would be cool to get some ideas for how to build it further and what improvements I could make.
2024 · github.com · its alternatives →
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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 →