Build a Deep Learning Library
87 points
7 hours ago
| 6 comments
| zekcrates.quarto.pub
| HN
amitav1
5 hours ago
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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.
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csantini
4 hours ago
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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

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butanyways
3 hours ago
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Its nice! Yeah a lot of the heavy lifting is done by Numpy.
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silentsea90
3 hours ago
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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!
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butanyways
2 hours ago
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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.
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grandimam
2 hours ago
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This is good. Its well positioned for software engineers to understand DL stuff beyond the frameworks.
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butanyways
2 hours ago
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thanks!!
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yunnpp
5 hours ago
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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.
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butanyways
5 hours ago
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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.
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p1esk
3 hours ago
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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.
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butanyways
2 hours ago
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Yes!!
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opan
2 hours ago
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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.
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