Once "too scary" to release, GPT-2 gets squeezed into an Excel spreadsheet

Abstraction: GPT-2 fully implemented in Excel spreadsheet for LLM education

Key points:

• Developer Ishan Anand packed the full GPT-2 model (released 2019) into an XLSB Microsoft Excel binary file; project called "Spreadsheets-are-all-you-need"
• Name references the 2017 "Attention Is All You Need" paper; designed as a teaching tool for non-developers to explore transformer internals
• Runs entirely locally with no API calls; requires latest desktop Excel (not web version)
• Users type input in cells and see next-token prediction results displayed in other cells; separate sheets expose intermediate transformer computations
• GPT-2 was originally withheld by OpenAI in 2019 due to fears of misuse; its inclusion in a spreadsheet underlines how much the field has advanced

Connections: Openai · GPT-2 · Transformers · Large Language Models · Tokenization

Source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2024/03/once-too-scary-to-release-gpt-2-gets-squeezed-into-an-excel-spreadsheet/