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Comment by ngiyabonga | Hacker News Reader

Hi Andrej!

First, thank you for your teaching, it has helped me a lot, didn't think I'd ever have the chance to say thank you, but here you are and I hope this gets to you!

Question - what's a relevant (05-2024) baseline to compare the performance of c code to? Back when you made nanoGPT you were seeing "the file train.py reproduces GPT-2 (124M) on OpenWebText, running on a single 8XA100 40GB node in about 4 days of training". So twice the memory on the c node, but unsure of data size /epochs, any other details I may be missing. I.e. what's the net uplift of running c vs "legacy" torch code?

Thanks again for everything.

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The baseline is definitely PyTorch (or JAX), and indeed something like nanoGPT. I just never got nanoGPT "past the finish line" of really crossing the t's and dotting the i's and reproducing the models with as much care as I did now and here in llm.c, and getting to the point where it's a single launch command that just does the thing.

I think I'll try to develop the `train_gpt2.py` inside llm.c to be that, so that we have the two implementations exactly side by side, and it's all nice and comparable.

The C/CUDA code is currently a little bit faster than PyTorch (last time I measured ~2 weeks ago it was about 6% faster), and I think we can push this further. This is done by manually hard-coding a bunch of fusions/optimizations that are non-trivial for torch.compile to find (e.g. our FusedClassifier). But PyTorch has some pending work/PRs that will also speed up their side a lot.

Ultimately my interest in llm.c is to have a nice, clean, minimal, super dependency-light repo in direct C/CUDA implementation, which I find aesthetically pleasing. And on top of that, educational, i.e. using all of the above as an endpoint of an intro LLM course.

Just out of curiosity, how do you feel about Tinygrad? They just released 0.9 and are also on the HN home page today.

Maybe talk to MasterClass...

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