OSS
qapla Trains a Char-Level Transformer From Scratch on an $8 ESP32-S3 — Full Backprop Hand-Written in C
Carloscodix/qapla appeared on the Hacker News front page (41 points) one day after being created on August 4, with 43 stars, Apache 2.0, written in C. The explicit claim is that this is not inference: the $8 microcontroller runs the complete training loop with backpropagation implemented by hand. It is a curiosity rather than a product, but it is the cleanest counterweight available to the assumption that training requires datacenter hardware, and the hand-written C backprop makes it genuinely readable as a teaching artifact.
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