I have fond memories of cs224d [1] taught by richardsocher. It’s a bit dated at this point as it was created in the pre-transformer era, but it was a very cool introduction to applying deep learning to nlp at the time.
Similar thoughts here. That was when I realized the potential of the Internet: I didn't have to be a grad student at a tier 1 research university to learn about the frontier.
I brought a group together to do this class using the YouTube videos and course materials available online. It is challenging but rewarding. We tackled it one lecture video per week. Started with over 30 learners and by last session we were down to 8.
Those suggestions they make for a B200 start at $4.99 an hour.
Is that really required, for starting out?
I've been tinkering with my own from-scratch LLM, but in the early phases I don't need anything more than a 4090 on Vast.ai