Alternatives
Products that do what Transformer Primitives – A visual explainer you can send to anyone does
I have had a few conversations in the past year with non-technical folks (traditional finance types, consultants) who asked for a simple explainer on how GPTs work. These people generally have the horsepower to grasp new concepts quickly but don't necessarily have the math background to dig in super deeply and want a stronger framework than "they predict words". I had generally been pointing them to Karpathy, Illustrated Transformer, and other youtube content but I figured something more hands on without the math requirement might be better at explaining questions like "why matrix…
- 1SA
I went down the rabbit hole on a side project and ended up building this: Strange Attractors(https://blog.shashanktomar.com/posts/strange-attractors). It’s built with three.js. Working on it reminded me of the little "maths for fun" exercises I used to do while learning programming in early days. Just trying things out, getting fascinated and geeky, and being surprised by the results. I spent way too much time on this, but it was extreme fun. My favorite part: someone pointed me to the Simone Attractor on Threads. It is a 2D attractor and I asked GPT to extrapolate it to…
Oct 2025 · blog.shashanktomar.com
- 2AI
My focus has been shifting towards the ML alignment space recently, and in particular the ability to translate large transformer models into human understandable circuits and algorithms. This problem potentially isn't solvable, but it is one that some groups have had success with after large amounts of effort. In attempting to address this issue, I've been developing Transpector. A tool scaling up and reducing the barrier to entry of techniques that these teams have been showing success with. Techniques aiming to understand the internal mechanics of the model. Currently this tool is focused…
2023 · github.com
- 3

- 4MC
Hi, we're MathGPT! MathGPT creates Khan-Academy-style animated math videos that intuitively explain complex concepts to students, helping them understand how to solve their problems step-by-step. We're currently serving over 2M users, processing 800M tokens / day and growing! If you try it out, we would appreciate feedback on how we can make the overall experience / video generation better! Email me at ygk2[at]cornell.edu.
2024 · math-gpt.org
- 5IM
2023 · vram.asmirnov.xyz
- 6SE
Hi HN! I made a tool that autogenerates simple, high-level explanations of concepts and organizes them in a somewhat university course-like structure so that it's easier to see how things are structured. Currently it has about 20,000 concepts on a range of topics but that's just what I generated so far, it should work with more obscure topics in the future. I love learning about random topics where I don't have a good background in like history or linguistics, but it's hard to figure out what topics there (you don't know what you don't know) are in certain fields and what they are even…
2023 · platoeducation.ai
- 7LP
Hi! I am doing a learning project, attempting to build an imperative language (and interpreter). The end product will be useless for others, I just want to learn and better understand how to build imperative languages. :) If someone else shares this interest and want to give some good hints on good resources I would be grateful. Currently I am looking at an awesome text by Bob Nystrom. All suggestions and tips on resources are most welcome. I am very much a beginner in this, but I find this topic very fascinating. Mail me or post links here! Cheers! You can try a beta version Online at…
2020
- 8MB
Probability involves a lot of extra-mathematical concepts and funny transforms. I have always had a hard time internalizing it. When I heard a couple years ago that Lemurs are actually capable of abstract math, that gave me a bit of motivation to try to finally conceptualize probability in terms of whole numbers, counts, geometric shapes, basically easy-to-remember mathematical primitives. This book might be interesting to folks interested in predictive science, research, or just anyone who may have taken probability or statistics and might like a refresher on some of the edges of these…
2022 · leanpub.com
- 9OS
Everyone saw the AlphaEvolve hype. I got obsessed with how it might work under the hood and decided to just build it myself. My setup uses GPT-4.1 to mutate matrix multiplication code, guided by a bunch of hand-crafted mutation strategies (loop reordering, tiling, Strassen, etc.). Each candidate is evaluated on both speed and accuracy. Then I apply Pareto selection with crowding distance to evolve better ones over generations. I ran into all the usual LLM reward hacks-returning the input, calling np.dot, etc. So I forced primitive-only implementations and tightly constrained the mutation…
2025
- 10IR
This course was intended for ages 7 and up, including adults. I really tried to make the material accessible to everyone, and hopefully not be too boring, while it establishes a solid foundation for learning anything else. If you do watch it, let me know if it is helpful in getting a solid foundation! My background: Before I got full-time into software development, I was doing a Ph. D in math at NYU. I thought YouTube needed something like this.
2023 · youtube.com
- 11WM
https://github.com/dioptra-ai/katiml
2023 · loom.com
- 12AI
I've created an interactive tutorial that teaches how AI models work. I set myself the goal of making it approachable enough that my 11 year old son Isaac can fully understand it. The tutorial aims to be easily understood by anyone who understands basic math, and yet give them a deep intuitive sense of not just how AI works but why it works the way it does. It does this using a series of interactive playgrounds that let the reader play with each idea. Currently there are 9 chapters, starting from scratch and ending with transformers. I'm planning to keep adding more chapters until the…
May 2026 · learnai.robennals.org
- 13IP
To be specific, the content is generated by a GPT-2 based model. https://amzn.to/2TCc0v2 Let me know if you have any questions :-)
2020
- 14WB
Hey HN, After GPT-3 created waves in the tech industry, a lot of AI tools were emerging and with that, some AI website builders But the results seemed way too generic to us. It felt like the developers were rushing to catch the wave instead of building a proper tool We took our time, did months of RnD and finally came up with something better than what others in the market are doing. It’s got better design output. While it’s still in beta, I wanted to show HN what we did. Will appreciate the feedback when you guys try it out. Here is the link to signup for the beta:…
2024 · dorik.com
- 15GA
Hi All - I'm Eric, and I’ve been working on a math-tutoring application that continually adapts to a child’s learning needs as they answer questions: www.grokkoli.com/beta (introduces new concepts in granular steps, figures out where/how learners might be confused & attempts to resolve it, speeds kids past the stuff they understand clearly, tracks their recall, answer-speed, and more). Currently in beta, looking for families with kids in grades 1-6 to beta-test. Especially interested in taking on families that are finding math to be a challenge. Happy to share more details if…
2021
- 16LY
Hi All, I've been writing a series on Galois Fields / Finite Fields from a computer programmer's perspective. It's essentially the guide that I wanted when I first learned the subject. I imagine it as a guide that could gently onboard anyone that is interested in the subject. I don't assume too much mathematical background beyond high-school level algebra. However, in some applications (for example: Reed-Solomon), familiarity with Linear Algebra is required. All code is written in a Literate Programming style. Code is written as reference implementations and I try hard to make…
2025 · xorvoid.com
- 17SC
During my (ongoing) engineering degree, I've often looked up formulas and been frustrated at the lack of reliable results. Some formulas (usually the easy ones) get their own blurb on Google results, while others are a few clicks away, or are most easily accessed by looking at random university slides on Google images. It felt like, in this day and age, there should be a site that serves the small but noble purpose of being a source of truth for formulas, while leveraging modern website technology to provide a fast and user-friendly experience. So, I made stemformulas.com (with some…
2023 · stemformulas.com
- 18WB
Hi everyone, We have been developing a platform to enable professionals to build AI assistants to help them through their work. After a few months, we realized people are trying to sell basic functionalities that can be built from scratch in a couple of hours. Due to this, individuals who are not familiar with the current SOTA are misinformed about the potential of generative models. So, we decided to open up some of our most popular templates as standalone tools for free to empower individuals and set a solid standard for what people should expect. We believe the barrier to accessing…
2024 · join.modularmind.app
- 19IM
I’m 15 and self-taught. I'm learning ML from scratch because I want to really understand how things work. I’m not into frameworks. I prefer math, logic, and C++. I implemented a basic MLP that supports different activation and loss functions. It was trained via mini-batch gradient descent. I wrote it from scratch, using no external libraries except Eigen (for linear algebra). I learned how a Neural Network learns (all the math) -- how the forward pass works, and how learning via backpropagation works. How to convert all that math into code. I’ll write a blog soon explaining how MLPs work in…
2025 · github.com
- 20TT
Trim is building a foundation model for physics. We found almost all well-maintained transformer-based architectures are optimized for language models. We’re releasing our own open-source transformer package that is optimized for physics. It achieves a 90% reduction in memory usage and a 3.5x speedup in a standard Navier-Stokes dataset.
2025 · github.com
- 21MI
The release of microgpt by Andrej Karpathy is a foundational moment for AI transparency. In exactly 243 lines of pure, dependency-free Python, Karpathy has implemented the complete GPT algorithm from scratch. As a PhD scholar investigating AI and Blockchain, I see this as the ultimate tool for moving beyond the "black box" narrative of Large Language Models (LLMs). The Architecture of Simplicity Unlike modern frameworks that hide complexity behind optimized CUDA kernels, microgpt exposes the raw mathematical machinery. The code implements: The Autograd Engine: A custom Value class that…
Feb 2026
- 22GH
I've never used .NET, know nothing about .NET or vb, or anything outside vc++ & MFC. Recently I gave GPT a try, guiding it step by step, and asking it to help me rebuild a tool I originally wrote in MFC. To my surprise, it worked: a full Excel-to-PDF automation app, done in 30 minutes; including a small algorithm I thought would be too tricky for AI to handle. I didn't understand even a single line of the code, I just kept asking, copying, and running. It felt amazing… but also terrifying.If AI can do this now, what happens 5 years from now? Here's a 5-min video I made showing the full…
2025
- 23IM
Hi HN, I am a solopreneur in the evenings and a software engineer during the day. In the past, I have created lots of calculators for my web projects and freelancing friends. These were pretty basic, but users always welcomed them. I also used currently available builders, but the problem was that they were either slow, broke on mobile devices, had nonsense page view limits, or were expensive. Some even ticked all those boxes. So I have decided to create my own, with a simple interface, and called it Creative Widgets (if it ever takes off, I plan to add more exciting stuff like charts, etc,…
2024 · creativewidgets.io
- 24CM
I loved the role-playing exercises I did during my MIT negotiation classes, but many of my classmates are too busy now to continue them after the classes have ended. Before ChatGPT/GPT-4, good negotiation AIs to practice with weren't really possible. So, I thought building short GPT-4 powered simulations to teach basic negotiation concepts would be a fun thing to do :). Let me know how you do!
2023 · negotiate.vercel.app
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