Smol course has a distinctive approach to teaching post-training, so I'm posting about how it’s different to other post-training courses, including the llm course that’s already available.
In short, the smol course is just more direct that any of the other course, and intended for semi-pro post trainers.
- It’s a minimal set of instructions on the core parts. - It’s intended to bootstrap real projects you're working on. - The material handsover to existing documentation for details - Likewise, it handsover to the LLM course for basics. - Assessment is based on a leaderboard, without reading all the material.
To start the smol course, follow here: smol-course
🚀 Ever dreamed of training your own Large Language Model from scratch? What if I told you it doesn't require a supercomputer or PhD in ML? 🤯
Introducing LLM Trainer - the educational framework that makes LLM training accessible to EVERYONE! Whether you're on a CPU-only laptop or scaling to distributed GPUs, we've got you covered. 💻➡️🖥️
Why LLM Trainer? Because existing tools are either too simplistic (hiding the magic) or too complex (requiring expert knowledge). We bridge the gap with:
🎓 Educational transparency - every component built from scratch with clear code 💻 CPU-first approach - start training immediately, no GPU needed 🔧 Full customization - modify anything you want 📈 Seamless scaling - from laptop to cluster without code changes 🤝 HuggingFace integration - works with existing models & tokenizers
Key highlights: ✅ Built-in tokenizers (BPE, WordPiece, HF wrappers) ✅ Complete Transformer implementation from scratch ✅ Optimized for CPU training ✅ Advanced features: mixed precision, gradient checkpointing, multiple generation strategies ✅ Comprehensive monitoring & metrics
Perfect for: - Students learning transformers - Researchers prototyping new ideas - Developers building domain-specific models
Ready to train your first LLM? It's easier than you think!
The course builds on smol course v1 which was the fastest way to learn to train your custom AI models. It now has:
- A leaderboard for students to submit models to - Certification based on exams and leaderboards - Prizes based on Leaderboards - Up to date content on TRL and SmolLM3 - Deep integration with the Hub’s compute for model training and evaluation
We will release chapters every few weeks, so you can follow the org to stay updated.
The open source AI community is just made of people who are passionate and care about their work. So we thought it would be cool to share our favourite icons of the community with a fun award.
Winners get free Hugging Face Pro Subscriptions, Merchandise, or compute credits for the hub.
This is a new initiative to recognise and celebrate the incredible work being done by community members. It's all about inspiring more collaboration and innovation in the world of machine learning and AI.
They're highlighting contributors in four key areas: - model creators: building and sharing innovative and state-of-the-art models. - educators: sharing knowledge through posts, articles, demos, and events. - tool builders: creating the libraries, frameworks, and applications that we all use. - community champions: supporting and mentoring others in forums.
Know someone who deserves recognition? Nominate them by opening a post in the Hugging Face community forum.