Build a Deep Learning Library

87 pointsposted 8 hours ago
by butanyways

12 Comments

amitav1

6 hours ago

This is cool! This summer I made something similar but in C++. The goal was to build an entire LLM, but I only got to neural networks. GitHub repo here: https://github.com/amitav-krishna/llm-from-scratch. I have a few blogs on this project on my website (https://amitav.net/building-lists.html, https://amitav.net/building-vectors.html, https://amitav.net/building-matrices.html (incomplete)). I hope to finish that series eventually, but some other projects have stolen the spotlight! It probably would have made more sense to write it in Python because I had no C++ experience.

csantini

5 hours ago

Did something similar a while back [1], best way to learn neural nets and backprop. Just using Numpy also makes sure you get the math right without having to deal with higher level frameworks or c++ libraries.

[1] https://github.com/santinic/claudioflow

butanyways

4 hours ago

Its nice! Yeah a lot of the heavy lifting is done by Numpy.

silentsea90

3 hours ago

Isn't this what Karpathy does as well in the Zero to Hero lecture series on YT? I am sure this is great as well!

butanyways

3 hours ago

If you are asking about the "micrograd" video then yes a little bit. "micrograd" is for scalars and we use tensors in the book. If you are reading the book I would recommend to first complete the series or atleast the "micrograd" video.

grandimam

3 hours ago

This is good. Its well positioned for software engineers to understand DL stuff beyond the frameworks.

yunnpp

5 hours ago

It's alright, but a C version would be even better to fully grasp the implementation details of tensors etc. Shelling out to numpy isn't particularly exciting.

butanyways

5 hours ago

I agree! What NumPy is doing is actually quite beautiful. I was thinking of writing a custom c++ backend for this thing. Lets see what happens this year.

p1esk

3 hours ago

If someone is interested in low level tensor implementation details they could benefit from a course/book “let’s build numpy in C”. No need to complicate DL library design discussion with that stuff.

opan

2 hours ago

Perhaps obvious to some, but this does not seem to be about learning in the traditional sense, nor a library in the book sense, unfortunately.