The Smol Training Playbook: The Secrets to Building World-Class LLMs
6 comments
·October 30, 2025lewtun
danielmarkbruce
I'm a little ways through this and it's great so far, nice job.
One of the reasons people build one though is to learn. Most smart folks are quite aware that the reality of pre-training a real LLM is going to involve some head banging against the wall (ie, things don't go smoothly like "building an llm from scratch" book), and they want to go through the process.
tsenturk
Hugging Face is not just an AI information-sharing website; it’s also a great learning platform for all AI learners. This documentation is one of the most impressive hands-on resources I’ve ever read.
abossy
What others would you recommend that are comparable in quality?
pixelmelt
Been reading a book by u/fpham "The Cranky mans guide to lora and qlora" and it's pretty great, writing quality isnt all there but the content is valuable for learning to make good finetunes
donkeyboy
The documentation for common ai packages is pretty good too. For example, pytorch docs, peft docs, timm docs.
Hi, Lewis here (one of the co-authors). Happy to answer any questions people have about the book :)