karpathy/char-rnn

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases no_license

Adoption not part of the score

12095 stars · 2630 forks observed · 2026-08-28

What it is AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, 2026-08-29, confidence not recorded

char-rnn is a Torch/Lua implementation of multi-layer recurrent neural networks (RNN, LSTM, GRU) for character-level language modeling. It trains on a plain text file to predict the next character and can then sample new text character by character.

Use cases

• train a character-level language model on a text corpus
• generate text in the style of a training file
• learn how LSTMs and GRUs are implemented
• experiment with recurrent neural networks on GPU
• reproduce the 'unreasonable effectiveness of RNNs' blog post results

When to choose

• you want the classic reference implementation of char-level RNNs for study or teaching
• you need a simple, well-known baseline for text generation experiments
• you are working in Torch/Lua with CUDA or OpenCL GPUs

When to avoid

• you need a maintained or production-ready framework - the repo points to torch-rnn as the preferred successor
• you work in Python with PyTorch/TensorFlow rather than Torch/Lua
• you need modern architectures like transformers or subword tokenization

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

machine-learning deep-learning llm-training deep-learning machine-learning lua char-rnn lstm gru torch language-modeling text-generation natural-language-processing linux macos gpu

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For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="karpathy/char-rnn")