Hey Folks! Happy Seahawks day 💚💙 Still smiling because the Seahawks won the Super Bowl! 🏈 What a day to be in Seattle! And on a personal note, another exciting win for my Build an LLM from Scratch journey. This week’s milestone: from training small to leveraging GPT-2. Here’s what I did: • Started by training my own mini language model with a small vocabulary and limited dataset from a short story publicly available to understand the fundamentals -tokenization, training loops, loss behavior. • Saved model checkpoints using PyTorch state_dict so I could resume training without starting over (training LLMs is expensive!). • Then took the big leap: loaded pretrained GPT-2 weights instead of training from scratch. • Mapped the OpenAI parameters into my custom architecture and moved the model to GPU for inference. • Generated coherent text the best validation that the weights were loaded correctly. Why this matters: Training from scratch teaches you how models learn. Loading pretrain...