vipin wiki

makemore

2 min read

makemore

Source

  • Source kind: github-repository
  • URL: https://github.com/karpathy/makemore
  • Discovery source: https://github.com/karpathy/makemore
  • License: MIT
  • Distribution policy: public-summary-plus-license-aware-excerpts
  • Public mirror status: partial excerpt
  • Content hash: e67257703dbc7966ee771e66bd44af6bbeacf7fbc265d19266488f924d33092c
  • First seen: 2026-05-15
  • Last changed: 2026-05-15

Classification

Summary

makemore makemore takes one text file as input, where each line is assumed to be one training thing, and generates more things like it. Under the hood, it is an autoregressive character-level language model, with a wide choice of models from bigrams all the way to a Transformer (exactly as seen in GPT). For example, we can feed it a database of names, and makemore will generate cool baby name ideas that all sound name-like, but are not already existing names. Or if we feed it a database of company names then we can generate new ideas for a name of a company. Or we can just feed it valid scrabble words and generat…

What This Teaches

  • How core neural network ideas can be rebuilt from first principles.
  • Useful for grounding later LLM work in gradients, activations, optimization, and model internals.

Why It Matters

This is high-priority for Vipin because it supports durable first-principles understanding instead of shallow API use.

Repository Snapshot

  • Full name: karpathy/makemore
  • Default branch: master
  • HEAD: 988aa59e4d8fefa526d06f3b453ad116258398d4
  • Stars at crawl: 3916
  • Forks at crawl: 972
  • File count: 4
  • README path: README.md
  • License path: LICENSE
  • Created: 2022-06-09T19:29:36Z
  • Updated: 2026-05-15T17:53:30Z
  • Pushed: 2024-06-04T19:32:27Z

Top-Level Structure

  • [root]: 4

File Extension Profile

  • .md: 1
  • .py: 1
  • .txt: 1
  • [none]: 1

Tags / Release-Like Markers

  • No git tags found in the shallow local clone.

Sample File Tree

  • LICENSE
  • makemore.py
  • names.txt
  • README.md

Public Handling Notes

  • EXTRACTED: This page records public metadata and a source-grounded summary.
  • INFERRED: Full local preservation, when available, is for private/local use unless a license or explicit source policy makes public redistribution safe.
  • Do not treat this page as permission to republish unlicensed source text or code wholesale.

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