Hi, I’m currently starting to learn how LLM works in depth, so I started using nanoGPT to understand how to train a model and I’d like to play around with the code a little more. So I set myself a goal to train a model that can write basic French, it doesn’t to be coherent or deep in its writing, just French with correct grammar. I only have a laptop that doesn’t have a proper GPU, so I can’t really train a model with billions of parameters. Do you think it’s possible without too much dataset or intensive training? Is it a better idea if I use something different from nanoGPT?
TLDR: I’d like to train my own LLM on my laptop which doesn’t have a GPU. It’s only for learning purpose, so my goal is that it can write basic French. Is it doable? If it is, do you have any tips to make this easier?
Sure! You’ll probably want to look at train-text-from-scratch in the llama.cpp project, it runs on pure CPU. The (admittedly little docs) should help, otherwise ChatGPT is a good help if you show it the code. NanoGPT is fine too.
For dataset, maybe you could train on French Wikipedia, or scrape from a French story site or fan fiction or whatever. Wikipedia is probably easiest, since they provide downloadable offline versions that are only a couple gigs.