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Show HN: TurboGPT: train 22KiB transformer in 13s

A developer released TurboGPT, an MIT-licensed byte-level GPT trainer written in CUDA C++ that trains a 22KiB transformer in 13 seconds. The tool builds on Windows with Visual Studio 2022 C++ tools and CUDA 13.4 via `build.ps1 -CudaArch 86`, stores checkpoints with model, optimizer, scheduler and trainer state for resuming with `--load`, and emits TensorBoard-compatible logs plus a `report.json`; its author reports 2.52435 BPB on hn1g after 1.5G training tokens.

read1 min views1 publishedSep 29, 2026
Show HN: TurboGPT: train 22KiB transformer in 13s
Image: Michielbdejong (auto-discovered)

Tiny byte-level GPT training in CUDA C++. MIT.

Windows, Visual Studio 2022 C++ tools, and CUDA 13.4:

.\build.ps1 -CudaArch 86

CudaArch is the GPU compute capability from NVIDIA's CUDA GPU list.

.\build\turbogpt.exe --data hn1g.txt --log-to runs/ctx4

The run stores its checkpoint at runs/ctx4/ctx4.pt, containing model, optimizer, scheduler, and trainer state. Use --load CHECKPOINT.pt to resume it.

runs/ctx4/report.json is derived from the log directory. Logs are TensorBoard-compatible: one report per batch, capped at 8Mi reports, and flushed with periodic or final checkpoints.

  • hn1g after 1.5G training tokens: 2.52435 BPB .
python tests\verify.py
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