▲CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch(cs336.stanford.edu)
167 points by kristianpaul 3 hours ago | 8 comments
▲meken 2 hours ago
I have fond memories of cs224d [1] taught by richardsocher. It’s a bit dated at this point as it was created in the pre-transformer era, but it was a very cool introduction to applying deep learning to nlp at the time.

[1] https://cs224d.stanford.edu

▲egl2020 1 hour ago
Similar thoughts here. That was when I realized the potential of the Internet: I didn't have to be a grad student at a tier 1 research university to learn about the frontier.
▲skerit 1 hour ago
> GPU compute for self-study

Those suggestions they make for a B200 start at $4.99 an hour.

Is that really required, for starting out? I've been tinkering with my own from-scratch LLM, but in the early phases I don't need anything more than a 4090 on Vast.ai

▲marcelroed 8 minutes ago
TA here. Definitely not! In fact we explicitly added sections in the first assignment to allow for scaling down to even local compute (M-series GPUs). For assignment 2 there are a few regions that require Triton support for your GPU, but everything can be adapted for much cheaper GPUs.

We were lucky enough to get Blackwell GPUs for Stanford students this year, which is why the writeups are written mostly around them.

▲grahameb 25 minutes ago
It seems strange that the required resources aren't provided by the educational institution?
▲ReptileMan 12 minutes ago
Two schools of thought - people are paying 100K per year, we should provide everything. Second is - they are paying 100K per year, do you think they will care for couple of hundred more.
▲root-parent 1 hour ago
You dont even need a GPU to train your own LLM.
▲flakiness 46 minutes ago
I beliee these are affordable enough for the intended audience (which is Stanford undergrad/master)
▲sonabinu 51 minutes ago
I brought a group together to do this class using the YouTube videos and course materials available online. It is challenging but rewarding. We tackled it one lecture video per week. Started with over 30 learners and by last session we were down to 8.
▲ChrisArchitect 6 minutes ago
Related:

AI Agent Guidelines for CS336 at Stanford https://github.com/stanford-cs336/assignment1-basics/blob/ma... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48359232)

▲airstrike 1 hour ago
I wonder if people prefer to learn this on their own or if building a community around open learning is something that others are interested in
▲danbrooks 28 minutes ago
I'd be interested in joining a discord server.

Would be great to have a community to discuss the material - even if folks can't commit to the full course.

▲storus 2 hours ago
Thanks for releasing this again! What are this year's changes to prior offerings?
▲tmule 2 hours ago
Are video lectures available online?
▲Bilal_io 2 hours ago
Youtube playlist link from the page https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuoVZkPBiKk&list=PLoROMvodv4...
▲aerohit 2 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JuoVZkPBiKk&list=PLoROMvodv4...
▲mindcrime 2 hours ago
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLoROMvodv4rMqXOcazWaT...
▲ 2 hours ago
▲dominotw 29 minutes ago
i recently started reading "build reasoning model from scratch" then i realized that i am not really interested in building part and just want to understand theory and practice behind it.

A want like a casual lesswrong style from ground up explanation.