5.5 nanoGPT
The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs.
Created Date: 2025-06-14
The simplest, fastest repository for training/finetuning medium-sized GPTs. It is a rewrite of minGPT that prioritizes teeth over education. Still under active development, but currently the file train.py reproduces GPT-2 (124M) on OpenWebText, running on a single 8XA100 40GB node in about 4 days of training. The code itself is plain and readable: train.py is a ~300-line boilerplate training loop and model.py a ~300-line GPT model definition, which can optionally load the GPT-2 weights from OpenAI. That's it.
5.5.1 Quick Start
If you are not a deep learning professional and you just want to feel the magic and get your feet wet, the fastest way to get started is to train a character-level GPT on the works of Shakespeare. First, we download it as a single (1MB) file and turn it from raw text into one large stream of integers:
python data/shakespeare_char/prepare.py