MicroGPT and Interactive Walkthrough
MicroGPT is a minimal GPT model built from scratch for educational purposes, with an interactive walkthrough that allows users to step through the tokenization, embedding, attention, and feed-forward layers of a small transformer to understand how language models generate text.
Background
- MicroGPT is a stripped-down, educational implementation of a transformer-based language model, designed to fit inside a single HTML file for hands-on learning. Unlike production models (GPT-4, Llama), MicroGPT has only a few million parameters and can run entirely in a browser.
- The page is a walkthrough from an ML security lab, likely part of a university or research course. It aims to teach how transformer internals work — tokenization, attention, feed-forward layers — by letting users inspect and manipulate the model's code and weights directly.
- The "interactive walkthrough" format lets users step through the forward pass of the model cell by cell (like a Jupyter notebook), viewing intermediate activations. This is meant to bridge the gap between theory (papers, diagrams) and the actual mechanics of inference.
- Understanding MicroGPT helps security researchers and engineers grasp how larger LLMs process input, which is prerequisite knowledge for analyzing model vulnerabilities (e.g., prompt injection, adversarial inputs, information leakage).