The best way to really understand how something works is to build it yourself. So I am wondering if there are any good tutorials on building your own LLM from scratch. I.e. implementing tokenisation, embeddings, attention and so on. I am not suggesting one could replicate chatGPT, but more a toy model that implements the core features but based on a much smaller corpus and training data.

Since you're posting here, you're looking for the shortcut.

The shortcut is Karpathy's "Let's Build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out" video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY

Then there is a good video that dives into LLMs and how they work that is quite approachable:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xTGNNLPyMI

From there, flesh out knowledge with his other videos, where he goes both extremely light and extremely deep:

https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy/videos

Anyway, I really like's Karpathy's video because he's very good at explaining LLMs at every level.

Andrej Karpathy: Let's build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCc8FmEb1nY

Andrej Karpathy's Nano GPT is reasonably accessible and easy to run.

https://github.com/karpathy/nanoGPT

https://www.amazon.com/Build-Large-Language-Model-Scratch/dp...

I'd get it straight from Manning and save a few bucks and take out the middle man: https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-large-language-model-f...

thanks. looks potential