I shrank a transformer until every number fitted on the screen and made the weights editable [R]
I've been teaching myself how LLMs actually work, not at the API level, but down to the matrix multiplications. To force myself to really understand the forward pass, I first built a complete transformer by hand in a spreadsheet from embeddings through to the loss. Then I turned
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This story from Reddit r/MachineLearning is relevant to the Research branch of the AI ecosystem and may affect models, products, or research direction.
Technical breakdown
I've been teaching myself how LLMs actually work, not at the API level, but down to the matrix multiplications. To force myself to really understand the forward pass, I first built a complete transformer by hand in a spreadsheet from embeddings through to the loss. Then I turned the forward pass into a web page so it's easier to share. It's a full transformer (single attention head, single block)
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