Microgpt explained interactively

politelemon

> By the end of training, the model produces names like "kamon", "karai", "anna", and "anton". None of them are copies from the dataset. Hey, I am able to see kamon, karai, anna, and anton in the dataset, it'd be worth using some other names: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karpathy/makemore/988aa59/...

windowshopping

The part that eludes me is how you get from this to the capability to debug arbitrary coding problems. How does statistical inference become reasoning? For a long time, it seemed the answer was it doesn't. But now, using Claude code daily, it seems it does.

malnourish

I read through this entire article. There was some value in it, but I found it to be very "draw the rest of the owl". It read like introductions to conceptual elements or even proper segues had been edited out. That said, I appreciated the interactive components.

grey-area

The original article from Karpathy: https://karpathy.github.io/2026/02/12/microgpt/

jmkd

It says its tailored for beginners, but I don't know what kind of beginner can parse multiple paragraphs like this: "How wrong was the prediction? We need a single number that captures "the model thought the correct answer was unlikely." If the model assigns probability 0.9 to the correct next token, the loss is low (0.1). If it assigns probability 0.01, the loss is high (4.6). The formula is − log ⁡ ( � ) −log(p) where � p is the probability the model assigned to the correct token. This is called cross-entropy loss."

ChrisArchitect

Related: Microgpt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47202708

love2read

Is it becoming a thing to misspell and add grammatical mistakes on purpose to show that an LLM didn't write the blog post? I noticed several spelling mistakes in Karpathy's blog post that this article is based on and in this article.

danhergir

I went through the article, and it makes sense to me that we're getting names as an output, but why doing so with names?

kinnth

That was one of the most helpful walkthroughs i've read. Thanks for explaining so well with all of the steps. I wasn't a coder but with AI I am actually writing code. The more i familiarise myself with everything the easier it becomes to learn. I find AI fascinating. By making it so simple and clear it helps when i think what i need to feed it.

thebiblelover7

I know many comments mentioned that it was too introductory, or too deep. But as someone that does not have much experience understanding how these models work, I found this overview to be pretty great. There were some concepts I didn't quite understand but I think this is a good starting point to learning more about the topic.

dreamking

It seems that Tmobile is originally block this website that I can't open this blog page... https://www.t-mobile.com/home-internet/http-warning?url=http...