kmkrofficial/LiteGPT

LiteGPT is a textbook example of an educational or personal experiment in training a Small Language Model (SLM). With only 124M parameters and 35 stars, it lacks the scale, performance, and community traction to be competitive. It utilizes standard open-source components (FineWeb, Alpaca, GPT-2 architecture) without adding any novel technical layers or optimizations. The defensibility is near zero, as the entire pipeline can be replicated by a single engineer with a few hundred dollars of compute in less than a week. In the broader market, it is already rendered obsolete by significantly more powerful SLMs like Microsoft's Phi series, Alibaba's Qwen models, and Google's Gemma-2b, which offer far superior performance and ecosystem integration. Frontier labs and major AI companies are aggressively targeting the SLM space for edge deployment, leaving no room for unoptimized 124M-parameter models without a specific hardware or domain-specific niche.