Alternatives
Products that do what Open-source fine-tuning in a Colab notebook does
Posted before, but wanted to share if you want an open source alternative to OpenAI fine-tuning, give Unsloth a try! Phi 3.5 was just released, and is distilled from GPT4. Unsloth makes finetuning 2x faster, uses 70% less VRAM + has no accuracy degradations. We rewrite all backprop steps and reduce FLOPs and write everything in Triton (JIT low level CUDA). If you want to own the weights after fine-tuning, give Unsloth a spin! I have free Colabs and Kaggle notebooks as well at https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth
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Hey HN! We're excited to release Unsloth Studio - a culmination of many things we wanted to provide to the community - it includes: 1. A Chat UI which has auto healing tool calling, Python & bash code execution, web search, image, docs input + more! 2. Finetuning of audio, vision, LLMs with an Auto AI Assist data prep 3. Supports GGUFs, Mac, Windows, Linux + audio gen 4. Has SVG rendering in browser, exporting to GGUF 5. gpt-oss harmony rendering, all inference parameters are pre-set and recommended 6. Data designer + synthetic data generation 7. Fast parallel data prep + embedding…
Mar 2026 · github.com
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Hey HN! I made a completely open sourced alternative to Weights and Biases with (insert cringe) blazingly fast performance (yes we use rust and clickhouse) Weights and Biases is super unperformant, their logger blocks user code... logging should not be blocking, yet they got away with it. We do the right thing by being non blocking. Would love any thoughts / feedbacks / roasts etc
2025 · github.com
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Hey HN! After using a combination of Unsloth and Axolotl a lot, and finding it generally painful to figure out the right performance tuning for things like batch sizing and multi-GPU sharding, I wrote a small Python lib that sets up known-good LoRA training configurations for Llama 3.1 8B and 70B Instruct, and includes helpers for distilling from larger models or training on serverless finetuning platforms, and includes a walkthrough for distilling DeepSeek-R1 into a Llama 3.1 8B LoRA... But you can use it for pretty much any finetuning task, not just distilling large models!
2025 · github.com
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After fine-tuning GPT for a personal project, I realized how tedious it is to write plain text in a massive JSON file. That's why I built this app for my own use, and I want to see if others could benefit from a tool like this as well ;)
2024 · finetuna-ui.com
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I made this after seeing someone posit the idea online yesterday over lunch then spent some time refining it. So far it's pretty impressive IMO! Right now I am running Qwen3-30B-A3B on my 24gb unified memory m4 MacBook Pro at 50 tok/sec and this should definitely not be working for such a large model on my middling hardware. Things are detailed in the README to get up and running and DESIGN.md has details on all the choices and such made along the way.
23d ago · github.com
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Kimi K3 has 2.78 trillion parameters and ships as 1.42 TB of weights. It clearly does not fit in the memory of a laptop. But K3 is a Mixture-of-Experts model. For each token, only a small fraction of its 896 experts per layer is activated. That changes the problem: the entire model does not need to be resident in RAM, as long as the weights required by each token can be reached quickly enough. We built WASTE — the Weight-Aware Streaming Tensor Engine — to explore that idea. WASTE keeps the dense, repeatedly used part of the model resident in memory, stores the routed experts in an…
Jul 2026
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VSCode extension with games (Snake, Plinko, slots), HN/LessWrong reader, and Pomodoro timer for AI coding wait times. Fake currency only. Marketplace: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=TouchGra... Built in a week with Claude Code after seeing Chad IDE get ratio'd for integrating real gambling. Happy to answer questions or get roasted on the code.
Dec 2025 · github.com
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I wanted to share a project I've been working on for the past few weeks: llgtrt. It's a Rust implementation of a HTTP REST server for hosting Large Language Models using llguidance library for constrained output with NVIDIA TensorRT-LLM. The server is compatible with the OpenAI REST API and supports structured JSON schema enforcement as well as full context-free grammars (via Guidance). It's similar in spirit to the Python-based TensorRT-LLM OpenAI server example but written entirely in Rust and built with constraints in mind. No Triton Inference Server involved. This also serves as a demo…
2024 · github.com
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Hey hackers, the world needs more AI researchers with good taste, and hardcore software folks have some of the best. Many software friends mentioned they learn better from implementations than from papers, but existing open-source examples rarely go beyond basic nanoGPT-level demos. To help bridge that gap, I spent the last two months full-time reimplementing and open-sourcing a self-contained implementation of every major modern deep learning technique from scratch. The result is beyond-nanoGPT, containing 20k+ lines of handcrafted, minimal, and extensively annotated PyTorch code. I'd love…
2025 · github.com
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Hello everyone, After recreating the accuracy/rough speed from David Page's implementation in hlb-CIFAR10 0.1.0 (18.1s on an A100, SXM4, Colab), it was down to some basic NVIDIA kernel profiling to figure out which operations were the long poles in the tent. Perhaps (somewhat?) unsurprisingly, the NCHW NHWC thrash was the worst part, but unfortunately the GhostBatchNorm was a barrier even using the faster-on-Ampere channels_last memory format. A quick note before continuing -- some may find the use of a convolutional network and on CIFAR10 to be curious. A quick answer to that would be…
2023 · github.com
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Hey guys, I made a VS Code extension, within which you can use the Mixtral 8x7B AI model for free. Mixtral 8x7B is a new AI model from the Mistral family, which outperforms GPT-3 in many benchmarks, a fact that I have personally confirmed in daily coding tasks, where Mistral 8x7B was the clear winner. You can use all the AI features, such as AI Lens with custom instructions and similar. I'm pretty sure some of features will be useful to you. I'd appreciate both, positive and negative feedback!
2023 · marketplace.visualstudio.com
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Hi HN! I've been hacking on this side project for the last month or two with the goal of making it dead simple to use cloud GPUs. I ran into this problem personally during the phd, and built my own tooling around it. I always thought it'd be fun to try to turn that tooling into a more general product... and bitbop.io is the result! All you have to do is run `ssh bitbop.io`, and you get your own personal dev GPU workstation in the cloud. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!
2024 · twitter.com
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Built a simple web app that tells you which open-source LLMs will work on your hardware. It auto-detects your specs, shows compatible models from Hugging Face, gives realistic performance estimates (tokens/sec), and recommends quantization settings. You can also manually input specs to see "what if I upgraded my RAM?" Made this after wasting time downloading giant models only to find they crawled on my hardware. Hope it saves you some frustration!
2025 · caniusellm.com
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I built this mostly because I love the intersection of game AI, high-performance computing, and poker. I’d love for anyone interested in game theory or CUDA optimization to tear it apart, test the accuracy, and give me feedback. Happy to answer any questions about the algorithms, the transition from CPU to GPU, or poker AI in general!
Jul 2026 · bupticybee.github.io
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Democratisation of local AI is key. I've been working on pushing the limits of commercial hardware, squeezing any extra bit possible. My Scientific Agentic AI hareness helped me to reallocate every single bit of it. I rewrote the Kernel, I went down the CUDA rabbit hole until I have been able to explain any bit and any ms of computational power involved in the process pushing the Qwen 30B-A3B from 8 tok7s to 19 tok/s with llama.cpp up to 22.2 tok/s with my project and 109 tok/s on not novel content and speeding up the prefill by 5-9X
Jul 2026 · github.com
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After six months of work, I am here again presenting Fluent – a tiny lang which is optimized for differentiable & reactive programming. Since I am not Conal Elliot, don't expect a beautiful theoretical unification of FRP and AD from first principles. Rather, a horrific monster that holds together mostly because a lot of duct-tape. The link points to the semi-interactive tour of the language, which will get the job done much better than I could in here. Hope you hate/like it!
Jul 2026 · mlajtos.github.io
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We built RapidFire AI, an open-source Python tool to speed up LLM fine-tuning and post-training with a powerful level of control not found in most tools: Stop, resume, clone-modify and warm-start configs on the fly—so you can branch experiments while they’re running instead of starting from scratch or running one after another. - Works within your OSS stack: PyTorch, HuggingFace TRL/PEFT), MLflow. - Hyperparallel search: launch as many configs as you want together, even on a single GPU - Dynamic real-time control: stop laggards, resume them later to revisit, branch promising configs in…
Sep 2025 · github.com
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I spent the past few weeks making an open source cloud code editing environment with an AI copilot and multiplayer collaboration! It's fully self-hostable in 5-10 minutes. There's a lot of minor improvements to be made, and some are already listed in the Github issues. Let me know what you think and feel free to try it out.
2024 · github.com
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