Normcore LLM Reads

normcore-llm.md

Anti-hype LLM reading list

Goals: Add links that are reasonable and good explanations of how stuff works. No hype and no vendor content if possible. Practical first-hand accounts and experience preferred (super rare at this point).

My own notes from a few months back.

Background

• Survey of LLMS
• Self-attention and transformer networks
• What are embeddings
• The Illustrated Word2vec - A Gentle Intro to Word Embeddings in Machine Learning (YouTube)
• Catching up on the weird world of LLMS

Foundational Papers

• Attention is all you Need
• Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
• BERT
• Language Models are Unsupervised Multi-Task Learners
• Training Language Models to Follow Instructions
• Language Models are Few-Shot Learners

Training Your Own

• Why host your own LLM?
• How to train your own LLMs
• Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models
• Opt-175B Logbook

Algos

• The case for GZIP Classifiers and more on nearest neighbors algos
• Meta Recsys Using and extending Word2Vec
• The State of GPT (YouTube)
• What is ChatGPT doing and why does it work
• How is LlamaCPP Possible?
• On Prompt Engineering
• Transformers from Scratch

Deployment

• Building LLM Applications for Production
• Challenges and Applications of Large Language Models
• All the Hard Stuff Nobody talks about when building products with LLMs
• Scaling Kubernetes to run ChatGPT
• Numbers every LLM Developer should know

Evaluation

• Interpretable Machine Learning
• Evaluating ChatGPT
• ChatGPT: Jack of All Trades, Master of None

UX

• Generative Interfaces Beyond Chat (YouTube)
• Why Chatbots are not the Future

Thanks to everyone who added suggestions on Twitter, Mastodon, and Bluesky.

https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/
https://eugeneyan.com/writing/llm-patterns/
https://github.com/huggingface/llm_training_handbook#tensor-precision--data-types

A Visual and Interactive Guide to the Basics of Neural Networks - https://jalammar.github.io/visual-interactive-guide-basics-n...

A Visual And Interactive Look at Basic Neural Network Math - https://jalammar.github.io/feedforward-neural-networks-visua...

Visualizing A Neural Machine Translation Model (Mechanics of Seq2seq Models With Attention) - https://jalammar.github.io/visualizing-neural-machine-transl...

The Illustrated Transformer - https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-transformer/

The Illustrated BERT, ELMo, and co. (How NLP Cracked Transfer Learning) - https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-bert/

The Illustrated GPT-2 (Visualizing Transformer Language Models) - https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-gpt2/

How GPT3 Works - Visualizations and Animations - https://jalammar.github.io/how-gpt3-works-visualizations-ani...

The Illustrated Retrieval Transformer - https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-retrieval-transformer...

The Illustrated Stable Diffusion - https://jalammar.github.io/illustrated-stable-diffusion/

If you want to learn how to code them, this book is great: https://d2l.ai/chapter_attention-mechanisms-and-transformers...