microgpt

microgpt.py

"""
The most atomic way to train and inference a GPT in pure, dependency-free Python.
This file is the complete algorithm.
Everything else is just efficiency.

@karpathy
"""

import os       # os.path.exists
import math     # math.log, math.exp
import random   # random.seed, random.choices, random.gauss, random.shuffle

# Let there be order among chaos
random.seed(42)

# Let there be an input dataset `docs`: list[str] of documents (e.g. a dataset of names)
if not os.path.exists('input.txt'):
    import urllib.request
    names_url = 'https://raw.githubusercontent.com/karpathy/makemore/refs/heads/master/names.txt'
    urllib.request.urlretrieve(names_url, 'input.txt')
docs = [l.strip() for l in open('input.txt').read().strip().split('\n') if l.strip()] # list[str] of documents
random.shuffle(docs)
print(f"num docs: {len(docs)}")

# Let there be a Tokenizer to translate strings to discrete symbols and back
chars = ['<BOS>'] + sorted(set(''.join(docs))) # character-level tokenizer with a BOS delimiter
vocab_size = len(chars)
stoi = { ch:i for i, ch in enumerate(chars) } # encoding: map string to integer
itos = { i:ch for i, ch in enumerate(chars) } # decoding: map integer to string
BOS = stoi['<BOS>']
print(f"vocab size: {vocab_size}")

# Let there be an Autograd to apply the chain rule recursively across a computation graph and so
# calculate the gradients of the loss with respect to model parameters.
class Value:
    """Stores a single scalar value and its gradient."""

    def __init__(self, data, _children=(), _op=''):
        self.data = data
        self.grad = 0
        self._backward = lambda: None
        self._prev = set(_children)
        self._op = _op # the op that produced this node, for graphviz / debugging / etc

    def __add__(self, other):
        other = other if isinstance(other, Value) else Value(other)
        out = Value(self.data + other.data, (self, other), '+')
        def _backward():
            self.grad += out.grad
            other.grad += out.grad
        out._backward = _backward
        return out

    def __mul__(self, other):
        other = other if isinstance(other, Value) else Value(other)
        out = Value(self.data * other.data, (self, other), '*')
        def _backward():
            self.grad += other.data * out.grad
            other.grad += self.data * out.grad
        out._backward = _backward
        return out

    def __pow__(self, other):
        assert isinstance(other, (int, float)), "only supporting int/float powers for now"
        out = Value(self.data**other, (self,), f'**{other}')
        def _backward():
            self.grad += (other * self.data**(other-1)) * out.grad
        out._backward = _backward
        return out

    def log(self):
        out = Value(math.log(self.data), (self,), 'log')
        def _backward():
            self.grad += (1 / self.data) * out.grad
        out._backward = _backward
        return out

    def exp(self):
        out = Value(math.exp(self.data), (self,), 'exp')
        def _backward():
            self.grad += out.data * out.grad
        out._backward = _backward
        return out

    def relu(self):
        out = Value(0 if self.data < 0 else self.data, (self,), 'ReLU')
        def _backward():
            self.grad += (out.data > 0) * out.grad
        out._backward = _backward
        return out

    def backward(self):
        # topological order all of the children in the graph
        topo = []
        visited = set()
        def build_topo(v):
            if v not in visited:
                visited.add(v)
                for child in v._prev:
                    build_topo(child)
                topo.append(v)
        build_topo(self)
        # go one variable at a time and apply the chain rule to get its gradient
        self.grad = 1
        for v in reversed(topo):
            v._backward()

    def __neg__(self): return self * -1
    def __radd__(self, other): return self + other
    def __sub__(self, other): return self + (-other)
    def __rsub__(self, other): return other + (-self)
    def __rmul__(self, other): return self * other
    def __truediv__(self, other): return self * other**-1
    def __rtruediv__(self, other): return other * self**-1
    def __repr__(self): return f"Value(data={self.data}, grad={self.grad})"

# Initialize the parameters, to store the knowledge of the model.
n_embd = 16     # embedding dimension
n_head = 4      # number of attention heads
n_layer = 1     # number of layers
block_size = 8  # maximum sequence length
head_dim = n_embd // n_head # dimension of each head
matrix = lambda nout, nin, std=0.02: [[Value(random.gauss(0, std)) for _ in range(nin)] for _ in range(nout)]
state_dict = {'wte': matrix(vocab_size, n_embd), 'wpe': matrix(block_size, n_embd), 'lm_head': matrix(vocab_size, n_embd)}
for i in range(n_layer):
    state_dict[f'layer{i}.attn_wq'] = matrix(n_embd, n_embd)
    state_dict[f'layer{i}.attn_wk'] = matrix(n_embd, n_embd)
    state_dict[f'layer{i}.attn_wv'] = matrix(n_embd, n_embd)
    state_dict[f'layer{i}.attn_wo'] = matrix(n_embd, n_embd, std=0)
    state_dict[f'layer{i}.mlp_fc1'] = matrix(4 * n_embd, n_embd)
    state_dict[f'layer{i}.mlp_fc2'] = matrix(n_embd, 4 * n_embd, std=0)
params = [p for mat in state_dict.values() for row in mat for p in row] # flatten params into a single list[Value]
print(f"num params: {len(params)}")

# Define the model architecture: a stateless function mapping token sequence and parameters to logits over what comes next.
# Follow GPT-2, blessed among the GPTs, with minor differences: layernorm -> rmsnorm, no biases, GeLU -> ReLU^2
def linear(x, w):
    return [sum(wi * xi for wi, xi in zip(wo, x)) for wo in w]

def softmax(logits):
    max_val = max(val.data for val in logits)
    exps = [(val - max_val).exp() for val in logits]
    total = sum(exps)
    return [e / total for e in exps]

def rmsnorm(x):
    ms = sum(xi * xi for xi in x) / len(x)
    scale = (ms + 1e-5) ** -0.5
    return [xi * scale for xi in x]

def gpt(token_id, pos_id, keys, values):
    tok_emb = state_dict['wte'][token_id] # token embedding
    pos_emb = state_dict['wpe'][pos_id] # position embedding
    x = [t + p for t, p in zip(tok_emb, pos_emb)] # joint token and position embedding
    x = rmsnorm(x)

    for li in range(n_layer):
        # 1) Multi-head attention block
        x_residual = x
        x = rmsnorm(x)
        q = linear(x, state_dict[f'layer{li}.attn_wq'])
        k = linear(x, state_dict[f'layer{li}.attn_wk'])
        v = linear(x, state_dict[f'layer{li}.attn_wv'])
        keys[li].append(k)
        values[li].append(v)
        x_attn = []
        for h in range(n_head):
            hs = h * head_dim
            q_h = q[hs:hs+head_dim]
            k_h = [ki[hs:hs+head_dim] for ki in keys[li]]
            v_h = [vi[hs:hs+head_dim] for vi in values[li]]
            attn_logits = [sum(q_h[j] * k_h[t][j] for j in range(head_dim)) / head_dim**0.5 for t in range(len(k_h))]
            attn_weights = softmax(attn_logits)
            head_out = [sum(attn_weights[t] * v_h[t][j] for t in range(len(v_h))) for j in range(head_dim)]
            x_attn.extend(head_out)
        x = linear(x_attn, state_dict[f'layer{li}.attn_wo'])
        x = [a + b for a, b in zip(x, x_residual)]
        # 2) MLP block
        x_residual = x
        x = rmsnorm(x)
        x = linear(x, state_dict[f'layer{li}.mlp_fc1'])
        x = [xi.relu() ** 2 for xi in x]
        x = linear(x, state_dict[f'layer{li}.mlp_fc2'])
        x = [a + b for a, b in zip(x, x_residual)]

    logits = linear(x, state_dict['lm_head'])
    return logits

# Let there be Adam, the blessed optimizer and its buffers
learning_rate, beta1, beta2, eps_adam = 1e-2, 0.9, 0.95, 1e-8
m = [0.0] * len(params) # first moment buffer
v = [0.0] * len(params) # second moment buffer

# Repeat in sequence
num_steps = 500 # number of training steps
for step in range(num_steps):

    # Take single document, tokenize it, surround it with BOS special token on both sides
    doc = docs[step % len(docs)]
    tokens = [BOS] + [stoi[ch] for ch in doc] + [BOS]
    n = min(block_size, len(tokens) - 1)

    # Forward the token sequence through the model, building up the computation graph all the way to the loss.
    keys, values = [[] for _ in range(n_layer)], [[] for _ in range(n_layer)]
    losses = []
    for pos_id in range(n):
        token_id, target_id = tokens[pos_id], tokens[pos_id + 1]
        logits = gpt(token_id, pos_id, keys, values)
        probs = softmax(logits)
        loss_t = -probs[target_id].log()
        losses.append(loss_t)
    loss = (1 / n) * sum(losses) # final average loss over the document sequence. May yours be low.

    # Backward the loss, calculating the gradients with respect to all model parameters.
    loss.backward()

    # Adam optimizer update: update the model parameters based on the corresponding gradients.
    lr_t = learning_rate * (1 - step / num_steps)
    for i, p in enumerate(params):
        m[i] = beta1 * m[i] + (1 - beta1) * p.grad
        v[i] = beta2 * v[i] + (1 - beta2) * p.grad ** 2
        m_hat = m[i] / (1 - beta1 ** (step + 1))
        v_hat = v[i] / (1 - beta2 ** (step + 1))
        p.data -= lr_t * m_hat / (v_hat ** 0.5 + eps_adam)
        p.grad = 0

    print(f"step {step+1:4d} / {num_steps:4d} | loss {loss.data:.4f}")

# Inference: may the model babble back to us
temperature = 0.6 # in (0, 1], control the "creativity" of generated text, low to high
print("\n--- inference ---")
for sample_idx in range(20):
    keys, values = [[] for _ in range(n_layer)], [[] for _ in range(n_layer)]
    token_id = BOS
    print(f"sample {sample_idx+1}: ", end="")
    for pos_id in range(block_size):
        logits = gpt(token_id, pos_id, keys, values)
        probs = softmax([l / temperature for l in logits])
        token_id = random.choices(range(vocab_size), weights=[p.data for p in probs])[0]
        if token_id == BOS:
            break
        print(itos[token_id], end="")
    print()

thank you, functional programmer

Thanks for this awesome distillation

recommend running with uv run --python pypy karpathy.py for speed and better garbage collection, python gets heavy on the memory.

Let there be order among chaos
Let there be Adam, the blessed optimizer and its buffers

Let there be art, and there was art.

Thank you @karpathy for your elegant work!

Hello, future history books 👋

Kinda weird how the dual vector version was deleted when it's actually a lot simpler.

Its prettier when you called it art.

uv run --python pypy microgpt.py

thanks for this

"final average loss over the document sequence. May yours be low." :)

now everyone will be saying they trained a neural network from scratch haha @karpathy

goat