karpathy/minGPT

Health v2 · maintenance only

Flags: no_releases

Adoption not part of the score

24840 stars · 3321 forks observed · 2026-08-28

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

A minimal, clean PyTorch re-implementation of OpenAI's GPT covering both training and inference in roughly 300 lines of code. It is designed primarily for education and interpretability, and is now semi-archived in favor of the author's nanoGPT rewrite.

Use cases

• learn how the GPT transformer model works internally
• train a small GPT model from scratch in PyTorch
• implement a character-level language model on a text file
• load a pretrained GPT-2 and generate text from a prompt
• study a readable reference implementation of a transformer
• train GPT on toy tasks like integer addition

When to choose

• you want a small, readable codebase to understand GPT architecture
• you need a hackable starting point for transformer experiments
• you are teaching or learning about language model training

When to avoid

• you need state-of-the-art performance or recent features - use nanoGPT instead
• you want to fine-tune large production-grade models
• you need active maintenance and community support

Facets

library · maturity maintenance

llm-training deep-learning machine-learning large-language-models deep-learning education machine-learning python gpt transformer pytorch educational language-model minimal-implementation gpu

Member repositories

For agents

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