LLM101n: Let's build a Storyteller

What I cannot create, I do not understand. -Richard Feynman

In this course we will build a Storyteller AI Large Language Model (LLM). Hand in hand, you'll be able create, refine and illustrate little stories with the AI. We are going to build everything end-to-end from basics to a functioning web app similar to ChatGPT, from scratch in Python, C and CUDA, and with minimal computer science prerequisits. By the end you should have a relatively deep understanding of AI, LLMs, and deep learning more generally.

Syllabus

Chapter 01 Bigram Language Model (language modeling)
Chapter 02 Micrograd (machine learning, backpropagation)
Chapter 03 N-gram model (multi-layer perceptron, matmul, gelu)
Chapter 04 Attention (attention, softmax, positional encoder)
Chapter 05 Transformer (transformer, residual, layernorm, GPT-2)
Chapter 06 Tokenization (minBPE, byte pair encoding)
Chapter 07 Optimization (initialization, optimization, AdamW)
Chapter 08 Need for Speed I: Device (device, CPU, GPU, ...)
Chapter 09 Need for Speed II: Precision (mixed precision training, fp16, bf16, fp8, ...)
Chapter 10 Need for Speed III: Distributed (distributed optimization, DDP, ZeRO)
Chapter 11 Datasets (datasets, data loading, synthetic data generation)
Chapter 12 Inference I: kv-cache (kv-cache)
Chapter 13 Inference II: Quantization (quantization)
Chapter 14 Finetuning I: SFT (supervised finetuning SFT, PEFT, LoRA, chat)
Chapter 15 Finetuning II: RL (reinforcement learning, RLHF, PPO, DPO)
Chapter 16 Deployment (API, web app)
Chapter 17 Multimodal (VQVAE, diffusion transformer)

Appendix

Further topics to work into the progression above:

Programming languages: Assembly, C, Python
Data types: Integer, Float, String (ASCII, Unicode, UTF-8)
Tensor: shapes, views, strides, contiguous, ...
Deep Learning frameowrks: PyTorch, JAX
Neural Net Architecture: GPT (1,2,3,4), Llama (RoPE, RMSNorm, GQA), MoE, ...
Multimodal: Images, Audio, Video, VQVAE, VQGAN, diffusion