Under The Hood

Description

Welcome to the Leanpub Launch video for Under The Hood: Build Every Layer of a Large Language Model from Scratch https://leanpub.com/under-the-hood by Ramchand Kumaresan! 00:00 Introduction to Under the Hood 00:16 Ramchand's background in program management and applied AI research 00:55 Making AI dependable, inspectable, and production-worthy 01:07 How Under the Hood grew from learning language models 01:40 Building, breaking, and measuring AI projects 02:02 The book as 35 hands-on projects 02:30 Why every chapter includes a “break it” section 03:08 Learning from how things break 03:35 Why AI tools can hide problems when everything seems to work 04:10 Training-loss curves, evaluation, and silent failure 04:50 Avoiding expensive AI mistakes by breaking things early 05:16 Closing remarks and book recommendation About the Book Most LLM books teach you to *use* models. This one teaches you to *build* them — every layer, every optimizer step, every cache, every quantization scheme — and then to deliberately break each piece so you understand why it exists in the first place. It is a workshop in book form. 35 hands-on projects, ~250,000 words, one tight spiral that takes you from a single autograd scalar all the way to fusing independently trained specialists into a routed system. No black boxes. No "import library, call method." You write the code, you run it, you break it, you measure what broke. Each project follows the same disciplined rhythm: Hook → The Concept → Why It Matters → The Build → **BREAK IT** → Optional Homework → Questions To Answer → Go Further → What You Now Know. Reading the book without breaking the code is half the experience. The breaks are where the lessons actually live. A public code companion lives at github.com/mechramc/Under-the-hood with runnable build.py, tests, and captured outputs for every project. If you have ever read a transformer paper and felt that the diagram and the code were in two different universes — this book closes that gap. **Build it. Break it. Measure it.** About the Author Ramchand Kumaresan is a Senior Program Manager at Procore Technologies and the founder of Murai Labs, a small AI research lab he runs solo from outside Austin. His arXiv work includes KALAVAI, UYIR, and Orion. He started writing this book because he kept meeting engineers who could ship against the OpenAI API but couldn't explain a logit — and realized he was one of them. Eighteen months later, this is the book he wished he'd had. Follow the author here! https://x.com/mechramc Thank you for watching, please like and leave a comment, we'd love to hear from you! Please Subscribe and Follow! YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/leanpub X: https://x.com/leanpub Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/leanpub Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/leanpub Create Your Own Leanpub Book! You can create your own book anytime here: https://leanpub.com/create/book Here's the tutorial showing how to write and publish a Leanpub book in your browser (it's free!): http://help.leanpub.com/en/articles/2932527-getting-started-writing-a-book-in-the-web-browser-writing-mode If you're a Leanpub author and you'd like to submit your own Launch video for us to publish, or if you'd like to record a Launch video with Len, please go here: https://leanpub.com/launch. #books #leanpublishing #selfpublishing #leanpub #writing #computerprogramming #largelanguagemodels #ai