nanochat
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
6recommend
1warn against
Nov 2, 2025first mention
Aug 24, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“I used the repo, claude and shadeform to train my own mini model for about $300”
“Kaparthy's notes on improving nanochat [1] are one of my favorite blog-like things to read.”
Show 3 more
“You should check out nanochat.”
“https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat”
“If you relax the SOTA aspect, Karpathy's nanochat has you covered”
Caveats and dissent
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- nanochat.karpathy.ai 2 mentions
- Backpropagation is a leaky abstraction (2016) 2 mentions
- I were 17, I'd learn how to build LLMs from scratch 1 mention
- Making Deep Learning Go Brrrr from First Principles 1 mention
- Nanocode: The best Claude Code that $200 can buy in pure JAX on TPUs 1 mention
- Autoresearch: Agents researching on single-GPU nanochat training automatically 1 mention
Also written as Nanochat. Data: nanochat.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 13
“torturing yourself working the GPU for days per iteration trying to run things like https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat, which is hardly an educational experience”
“I used the repo, claude and shadeform to train my own mini model for about $300”
“Kaparthy's notes on improving nanochat [1] are one of my favorite blog-like things to read.”
How about the very last "Kept Improvement" in the plot? It's titled "random seed 42 -> 137". I do think this project is quite conceptually interesting, but the model literally choosing a different random seed to achieve lower loss feels pretty far removed from the flowery sci-fi writing at the top of the readme.
“I wanted to train Nanochat d26 to GPT-2 level”
“Karpathy has other projects, e.g. : https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat”
“You should check out nanochat.”
“https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat”
“If you relax the SOTA aspect, Karpathy's nanochat has you covered”
“this is like a kindergartner in some ways”
“Context: https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat”
“he published nanochat 3 weeks ago”
“The recently released nanochat https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat is fantastic.”