Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch)

Learn how to create, train, and tweak large language models (LLMs) by building one from the ground up!

In Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch), you’ll discover how LLMs work from the inside out. In this insightful book, bestselling author Sebastian Raschka guides you step by step through creating your own LLM, explaining each stage with clear text, diagrams, and examples. You’ll go from the initial design and creation to pretraining on a general corpus, all the way to finetuning for specific tasks.

Build a Large Language Model (from Scratch) teaches you how to:

• Plan and code all the parts of an LLM
• Prepare a dataset suitable for LLM training
• Finetune LLMs for text classification and with your own data
• Use human feedback to ensure your LLM follows instructions
• Load pretrained weights into an LLM

The large language models (LLMs) that power cutting-edge AI tools like ChatGPT, Bard, and Copilot seem like a miracle, but they’re not magic. This book demystifies LLMs by helping you build your own from scratch. You’ll get a unique and valuable insight into how LLMs work, learn how to evaluate their quality, and pick up concrete techniques to finetune and improve them.

The process you use to train and develop your own small-but-functional model in this book follows the same steps used to deliver huge-scale foundation models like GPT-4. Your small-scale LLM can be developed on an ordinary laptop, and you’ll be able to use it as your own personal assistant.