I just watched a machine learn to speak. Over the course of 4 hours, for £75 ($100), I trained my own conversational AI from scratch. Not by using an API or fine-tuning someone else’s model - I mean actually training a language model, watching it go from random noise to something that can hold a conversation.

It’s a strange experience. You’re essentially watching intelligence emerge from mathematics.

The setup

I used nanochat as my foundation - Andrej Karpathy’s “minimal, hackable” implementation of the full LLM training pipeline. The beauty of nanochat is that it’s simple enough to understand but complete enough to actually work. No mysterious or bloated frameworks - just the core process laid bare.