nanoGPT by Andrej Karpathy

Minimal GPT implementation in Learning

People recommend it as a dense, maximally educational GPT implementation by Andrej Karpathy, valued for teaching how language models work.

8 people gave an opinion

Each figure is one person. RecommendsCriticizes

The same three rules apply to every product, and the badge can’t be bought. How the badge works

The reasons people give, with the number of comments that give each one. Open a reason to read what they said.

Each mark is one comment

Strong machine learning education value
“Between this, nanoGPT, and the Zero to Hero series, he has probably done more for ML education than most university programs.”
Comment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Microgpt”
“did more to democratize AI understanding than most research papers”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI leader”
“his "zero to hero" videos, nanoGPT, etc, are all great”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “I’ve joined Anthropic”
Pairs with Zero to Hero videos
“Between this, nanoGPT, and the Zero to Hero series, he has probably done more for ML education than most university programs.”
Comment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Microgpt”
“his "zero to hero" videos, nanoGPT, etc, are all great”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “I’ve joined Anthropic”
Makes AI understanding more accessible
“distilling all of his wisdom and taste into a very dense and maximally educational version”
Comment from 25 Jul 2026 in “Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed”
“did more to democratize AI understanding than most research papers”
Comment from 19 May 2026 in “Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI leader”

The same counts for each, so you can compare like for like. The tick on each bar marks the 2 to 1 line the badge needs.

nanoGPT by Andrej Karpathy compared with 1 alternative
Product	Recommend	Criticize	Approval	Months	Owned	Badge
microgpt by Andrej Karpathy	37	7	84%	6	—	Approved
nanoGPT by Andrej KarpathyThis page	8	0	100%	6	—	—

7 of the 8 comments that mention it, newest first. Each links to the original comment.

“has less learning value than the one Andrej Karpathy made to teach people the building blocks involved in a GPT”

RecommendsComment from 29 Sep 2026 in “Show HN: TurboGPT: train 22KiB transformer in 13s”

“distilling all of his wisdom and taste into a very dense and maximally educational version”

RecommendsComment from 25 Jul 2026 in “Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed”

“did more to democratize AI understanding than most research papers”

RecommendsComment from 19 May 2026 in “Anthropic hires OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, former Tesla AI leader”

“his "zero to hero" videos, nanoGPT, etc, are all great”

RecommendsComment from 19 May 2026 in “I’ve joined Anthropic”

“original repo had an ARC memory leak that capped training at ~119 compile loads per process”

MixedComment from 3 Mar 2026 in “Inside the M4 Apple Neural Engine, Part 1: Reverse Engineering”

“Between this, nanoGPT, and the Zero to Hero series, he has probably done more for ML education than most university programs.”

RecommendsComment from 1 Mar 2026 in “Microgpt”

“behind an aggregator (OpenRouter, NanoGPT)”

RecommendsComment from 28 Feb 2026 in “How do I cancel my ChatGPT subscription?”

Counts come from 1,795,640 Hacker News comments, November 2025 to November 2026. How we count. Report a mistake.