According to Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy), nanochat now features a primordial identity and can articulate details about itself—such as being nanochat d32, its $800 cost, and its English language limitations—through synthetic data generation. Karpathy explains that large language models (LLMs) inherently lack self-awareness or a built-in personality, so all such traits must be explicitly programmed. This is achieved by using a larger LLM to generate synthetic conversations that are then mixed into training or fine-tuning stages, allowing for custom identity and knowledge infusion. Karpathy emphasizes the importance of diversity in generated data to avoid repetitive outputs and demonstrates this with an example script that samples varied conversation starters and topics. This customization enables businesses to deploy AI chatbots with unique personalities and domain-specific capabilities, unlocking new customer engagement opportunities and product differentiation in the AI market (Source: x.com/karpathy/status/1980508380860150038).

According to Andrej Karpathy (@karpathy) on Twitter, nanochat is a newly released open-source project that provides a minimal, from-scratch, full-stack training and inference pipeline for building a ChatGPT-like large language model (LLM). Unlike Karpathy's previous nanoGPT, which only handled pretraining, nanochat enables users to train a transformer-based LLM from pretraining through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning (RL), all in a single, dependency-minimal codebase. The pipeline includes a Rust-based tokenizer, training on FineWeb data, midtraining with SmolTalk conversations, and evaluation across benchmarks such as ARC-Easy, MMLU, GSM8K, and HumanEval. Notably, users can deploy and interact with their own LLM via a web UI or CLI after as little as four hours of training on a cloud GPU, making advanced LLM development more accessible and affordable for researchers and developers. This release lowers the entry barrier for custom LLM experimentation, offering business opportunities in rapid prototyping, education, and research tools within the AI industry (source: @karpathy).