GPT-2 mysteries :: Giles' blog

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GPT-2 mysteries

After my LLM from scratch series, there were a few mysteries to resolve -- in particular, why my own models were worse than OpenAI's on instruction-following. These occasional posts are my attempts to solve them.

Why do OpenAI's GPT-2 weights beat mine? (29 July 2026). An introduction: what is the problem that my models have with the instruction-following task, and why is it worth investigating?
Why do OpenAI's GPT-2 weights beat mine? Part two: the bugfix (30 July 2026). ChatGPT spotted a bug in my eval code, so I needed to fix that before digging in.
Why do OpenAI's GPT-2 weights beat mine? Part three: testing overtraining (31 July 2026). The first real experiment: GPT-2 was overtrained, so if I overtrain my own models, does it help?