How To Train Your LLM 🐉
🚨Looking for a venue, please reach out!🚨
A hands-on beginner workshop on what actually happens inside an LLM.
⚡ Sponsored by Modal
You’ve used ChatGPT. Maybe you’ve played with prompts, APIs or open models.
But what does it actually mean to train a language model?
In this 4-hour workshop, we’ll go from a tiny model that barely knows how to speak to a real pretrained LLM that we can fine-tune ourselves.
No AI magic. No 80-slide lecture. We’ll actually build things.
What we’ll do
Turn text into tokens and see how next-token prediction works
Train a tiny language model from scratch
See how a Transformer improves on our first model
Experiment with temperature, training time and model size
Run a real open-source LLM on a GPU
Understand CPU vs. GPU, memory and quantization
Fine-tune a pretrained LLM with LoRA
Compare the model before and after training
You’ll leave understanding
Training vs. inference. Pretraining vs. fine-tuning. Tokens, parameters, Transformers, GPUs, LoRA and why any of it matters.
More importantly, you’ll have actually used these concepts yourself instead of just hearing about them.
Who is this for?
Developers, students, data/product people and technically curious humans who want to understand LLMs beyond prompting.
You don’t need previous machine-learning experience.
Basic Python familiarity will help, but the exercises are guided.
Format
4 hours · Beginner-friendly · Hands-on
GPU compute for the workshop is sponsored by Modal. We’ll use a prepared cloud environment, so you won’t need to install CUDA, own a powerful laptop or spend half the workshop debugging dependencies.
Bring your laptop and curiosity.
🚨We're looking for a venue to host this. Please contact Sonya on LinkedIn.🚨