Developer trains transformer AI model from scratch on $8 ESP32-S3 microcontroller using hand-coded backpropagation in C—not inference, full training loop on-chip.

GitHub - Carloscodix/qapla: A char-level transformer trained from scratch on an $8 ESP32-S3. Not inference: the chip runs the full training loop, with backprop written by hand in C.

This text was written with the assistance of an AI. Careful: assistance doesn't mean the AI wrote it. It means it corrected, reviewed and filled in some parts, but the author is human (or so I believe). Léeme en español Qapla' Project This is how you train a transformer from scratch on an eight-buck ESP32-S3. The (Klingon) GPT nobody asked for but everybody needed. And why did we need it? Because we take for granted that training a model requires a GPU or a datacenter. Not always: sometimes some...