karpathy/makemore resource

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

4215 stars · 1034 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

A single-file, hackable PyTorch implementation of an autoregressive character-level language model, ranging from bigrams to a full Transformer. It is primarily an educational tool for learning how language models work by generating text similar to an input file, such as new baby names.

Use cases

• generate new baby names from a list of names
• learn how transformers and language models work internally
• train a character-level language model on a small text file
• compare bigram, MLP, RNN, LSTM, GRU, and transformer language models
• generate company name ideas from examples

When to choose

• you want a minimal, readable codebase to study language model fundamentals
• you need lightweight character-level text generation that runs on a laptop
• you are teaching or learning deep learning with paper-backed implementations

When to avoid

• you need a production-grade, feature-rich training framework
• you want large-scale word-level or multilingual language modeling
• you need pretrained models or extensive tooling and support

Facets

learning-resource · maturity maintenance

machine-learning llm-training nlp deep-learning large-language-models education python cross-platform pytorch educational language-model transformer character-level text-generation karpathy natural-language-processing gpu

Member repositories

For agents

markdown · JSON · MCP: product_card(name="karpathy/makemore")