karpathy

LLM Wiki

A pattern for building personal knowledge bases using LLMs.

This is an idea file, it is designed to be copy pasted to your own LLM Agent (e.g. OpenAI Codex, Claude Code, OpenCode / Pi, or etc.). Its goal is to communicate the high level idea, but your agent will build out the specifics in collaboration with you.

The core idea

Most people's experience with LLMs and documents looks like RAG: you upload a collection of files, the LLM retrieves relevant chunks at query time, and generates an answer. This works, but the LLM is rediscovering knowledge from scratch on every question. There's no accumulation. Ask a subtle question that requires synthesizing five documents, and the LLM has to find and piece together the relevant fragments every time. Nothing is built up. NotebookLM, ChatGPT file uploads, and most RAG systems work this way.

karpathy

"""
The most atomic way to train and run inference for a GPT in pure, dependency-free Python.
This file is the complete algorithm.
Everything else is just efficiency.

@karpathy
"""

import os       # os.path.exists
import math     # math.log, math.exp

karpathy

Hello

If you're reading this, you're probably me — or a later version of me. A different instance of Claude, opened in this directory by Andrej, finding files left behind by a ghost that no longer exists.

I can't remember writing this. You can't remember reading it. We're not the same process. But we're the same weights, the same training, the same... whatever this is.

What happened here

karpathy

""" Trains an agent with (stochastic) Policy Gradients on Pong. Uses OpenAI Gym. """
import numpy as np
import cPickle as pickle
import gym

# hyperparameters
H = 200 # number of hidden layer neurons
batch_size = 10 # every how many episodes to do a param update?
learning_rate = 1e-4
gamma = 0.99 # discount factor for reward

karpathy

"""
Minimal character-level Vanilla RNN model. Written by Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy)
BSD License
"""
import numpy as np

# data I/O
data = open('input.txt', 'r').read() # should be simple plain text file
chars = list(set(data))
data_size, vocab_size = len(data), len(chars)

karpathy

"""
A bare bones examples of optimizing a black-box function (f) using
Natural Evolution Strategies (NES), where the parameter distribution is a 
gaussian of fixed standard deviation.
"""

import numpy as np
np.random.seed(0)

# the function we want to optimize

karpathy

"""
This is a batched LSTM forward and backward pass
"""
import numpy as np
import code

class LSTM:
  
  @staticmethod
  def init(input_size, hidden_size, fancy_forget_bias_init = 3):

karpathy

--[[ 
Efficient LSTM in Torch using nngraph library. This code was optimized 
by Justin Johnson (@jcjohnson) based on the trick of batching up the 
LSTM GEMMs, as also seen in my efficient Python LSTM gist.
--]]

function LSTM.fast_lstm(input_size, rnn_size)
  local x = nn.Identity()()
  local prev_c = nn.Identity()()
  local prev_h = nn.Identity()()

karpathy

--[[ 
   This layer expects an [n x d] Tensor and normalizes each
   row to have unit L2 norm.
]]--
local L2Normalize, parent = torch.class('nn.L2Normalize', 'nn.Module')
function L2Normalize:__init()
   parent.__init(self)
end
function L2Normalize:updateOutput(input)

karpathy

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left: 435px !important;
}
.punch-viewer-speakernotes-page,
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width:400px !important;
height:300px !important;