A Book to Build Language Models from Scratch
burkov · x · 2026-07-15
This post recommends Andriy Burkov’s The Hundred-Page Language Models Book, positioning it as ideal for those who want to genuinely build language models rather than just understand the concepts.
The author highlights three main strengths: first, it's highly dense and fluff-free, covering everything from n-gram and RNN to Transformer, LLM fine-tuning, and prompting; second, it's code-oriented, with examples runnable on PyTorch and Google Colab, even guiding readers to implement three language model architectures from scratch, including a Transformer; third, the author's previous ML books have an excellent reputation, proving the credibility of this "short, fast, hands-on" teaching style.
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