CS336: Language Modeling from Scratch

(cs336.stanford.edu)

162 points | by kristianpaul 3 hours ago ago

16 comments

  • meken 2 hours ago 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 an hour ago 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 2 hours ago 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

    • grahameb 17 minutes ago ago

      It seems strange that the required resources aren't provided by the educational institution?

      • ReptileMan 4 minutes ago 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 an hour ago ago

      You dont even need a GPU to train your own LLM.

    • flakiness 38 minutes ago ago

      I beliee these are affordable enough for the intended audience (which is Stanford undergrad/master)

  • sonabinu 43 minutes ago 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.

  • airstrike an hour ago 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 20 minutes ago 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 ago

    Thanks for releasing this again! What are this year's changes to prior offerings?

  • dominotw 21 minutes ago 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.

  • tmule 2 hours ago ago

    Are video lectures available online?