TRAINING A 67M-PARAMETER TRANSFORMER ON AN M4 MAC MINI

Summary from the TLDR AI newsletter

This paper takes a grounded look at what happens when you build a modern language model from first principles, train it on real data, and ask it to do something unforgiving. The author trained a 67-million-parameter transformer end-to-end on an M4 Mac Mini using Apple Silicon MPS - no discrete GPU, just 24 gigabytes of unified memory. The resulting model achieved 93.94% exact-match accuracy on CLI command generation.