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EnrichedResearchReddit r/MachineLearningCommunityLive · 5d agoPublished 6/28/2026

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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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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