Ask HN: How to Learn LLM Fundamentals

[AETackaberry]

As a Software Engineer that is interested in learning LLM fundamentals, what is your recommended course of action? Are there any courses or curricula you would recommend?

[hislaziness]

I really liked this series. https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html

[AETackaberry → hislaziness]

I am definitely planning to start with this series, seems like a no-brainer!

The part I'm unsure of is what next? Seems like diving into papers might be a decent leap. Who knows, maybe GPT-4 can help me bridge the gap

[hislaziness → AETackaberry]

Papers would be good next step. The concept and the algorithms do not seem very complex. The training and fine tuning is what needs effort and infrastructure.

[quickthrower2 → hislaziness]

Thanks that series looks quite fun to do

[TroyZ]

For a high level overview of transformers/GPT, you can check out this article: https://medium.com/design-bootcamp/how-chatgpt-really-works-...

The article provides references to the original papers and other articles explaining the subject, which can be great sources to dive deeper.

[bfg_damien]

Here are a few resources that might help get you started:

1. A thread explaining the internal working of transformers: https://twitter.com/hippopedoid/status/1641432291149848576?s...

2. Paper by DeepMind which provides pseudo-code for important algorithms for Transformer models: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2207.09238.pdf

3. Another thread specifically on large language models: https://twitter.com/cwolferesearch/status/164044611134855577...

Once again these are not courses per se, but do provide intuitive explanations for how transformers work. There is also the nanoGPT series of videos by Karpathy on youtube. First video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY

[felipelalli]

http://www.iasylum.net/writings/2023-03-29-if-you-are-curiou...

[jytechdevops]

What a coincidence, I actually ran across this github repo for LLM fundamentals today: https://gist.github.com/rain-1/eebd5e5eb2784feecf450324e3341...

gl on your journey

[is_true]

I think this blog posts is nice overview to help you go deeper in the topics mentioned: https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2023/02/what-is-chatgpt-...

[seydor]

There s this guy who has made in depth videos about transformers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3xbVmpdJwU