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24 alternatives to Trained Tiny Tales GPT(30M model)from scratch and deployed in $15

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…

Trained Tiny Tales GPT is a 30-million parameter language model trained from scratch on 1 billion tokens and deployed as a web service. The model uses a LLaMA-style architecture and was trained on preprocessed text… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Trained Tiny Tales GPT(30M model)from scratch and deployed in $15 launched in 2024; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    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.

    Apr 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2

    A few days ago I found myself trying out GLM 5.2 and was really positively impressed. The capabilities and security I was getting from this LLM are similar to those I've gotten from models like Claude or GPT, and this really surprised me. But then I thought, "I wonder how it would work on a normal computer like mine," and above all, "I wonder if it would work without going into OOM on a computer like mine." So I started working with the help of agents to test this possibility. I started converting the model to int4, understanding MTP usage, and if possible implementing DSA for long context.…

    Jul 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  3. 3
    nanochat▲349

    Build your won ChatGPT for $100 on a single GPU

    2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Dolly▲113

    Democratizing the magic of ChatGPT with open models

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Fast and efficient models optimized for coding and subagents

    Mar 2026 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  6. 6

    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 →

  7. 7
    GPT-J▲394

    Open-source cousin of GPT-3, everyone can use it

    2021 · 6b.eleuther.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Create custom GPT-3 AI models in minutes, with No Code

    2022 · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Announcing GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, & GPT-4.1 nano in the API

    2025 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    I've been playing around with https://github.com/zphang/minimal-llama/ and https://github.com/tloen/alpaca-lora/blob/main/finetune.py, and wanted to create a simple UI where you can just paste text, tweak the parameters, and finetune the model quickly using a modern GPU. To prepare the data, simply separate your text with two blank lines. There's an inference tab, so you can test how the tuned model behaves. This is my first foray into the world of LLM finetuning, Python, Torch, Transformers, LoRA, PEFT, and Gradio. Enjoy!

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Absolute minimalistic implementation of a GPT-like transformer using only numpy (<650 lines). - joennlae/tensorli

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12

    My puny version of ChatGPT. This was based on the excellent LLM lecture series by Andrej Karpathy: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;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 →

  13. 13

    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 →

  14. 14

    Do 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 →

  15. 15

    Fine-tune LLMs from one YAML. Layer streaming trains an 8B model on a 4 GB laptop GPU. - MakazhanAlpamys/Soup

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16MI

    very much inspired by karpathy's microgpt of the same name. it's (by default) a 4000 param GPT&#x2F;LLM&#x2F;NN that learns to generate names. this is sorta an educational tool in that you can visualize the activations as they pass through the network, and click on things to get an explanation of them.

    Feb 2026 · microgpt.boratto.ca · its alternatives →

  17. 17WM

    Try it out! https:&#x2F;&#x2F;glhf.chat&#x2F; 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 →

  18. 18

    I previously posted this a month and a half ago: https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;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 →

  19. 19

    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 →

  20. 20

    Create, discover & monetize GPT AI tools

    2023 · tinyforest.co · its alternatives →

  21. 21TL
  22. 22

    Hi everyone, I started working on nanoeuler after the ban of anthropic's fable because my ambition and dream is to work in the AI field in anthropic. The two interesting reasons that led me to create nanoeuler were (1) interfacing with llm does not mean understanding how they are composed and (2), working on llm with a very low-level layer to understand the correlation between parameters and data and growth of the model and how the GPU works and how some layers can be optimized. So I started working on it with a research aspect by making nanoeuler grow more and more but doing one step after…

    Jun 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23IC

    A friend and I wrote a book on how to build and train Deep Learning models in Go. We wanted it to be a useful reference for deep learning basics for Go programmers. Deep Learning is slowly seeping into everything we use every day and we thought it would be great if more people could do it in Go. The book is available here and on Amazon as well. https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.packtpub.com&#x2F;big-data-and-business-intelligence&#x2F;hands-deep-learning-go We would appreciate any feedback and we're always looking to improve.

    2019 · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    https:&#x2F;&#x2F;medium.com&#x2F;@theaniketgiri&#x2F;three-months-ago-i-wanted-...

    Oct 2025 · github.com · its alternatives →

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