---
language:
  - en
license: apache-2.0
library_name: pytorch
inference: false
datasets:
  - roneneldan/TinyStories
tags:
  - tinystories
  - language-modeling
  - from-scratch
  - small-language-model
---

# v11-tinystories-115m-base

A 115.1M-parameter decoder-only transformer trained **from scratch** on
TinyStories for 16M tokens, using the
[v11 tokenizer](https://huggingface.co/chrishayuk/v11-tokenizer).

This is the **base pretrain only**: phase 1, no frozen-FFN attention retrain, and
**no maths mid-training**. It writes competent children's-story English and it
**cannot do arithmetic** — it narrates straight past the place a number belongs
rather than putting a wrong number there. That is the intended state of this
checkpoint, not a defect: it is the starting point for the mid-training
experiments in
[tinystories-train-video](https://github.com/chrishayuk/tinystories-train-video).

## Loading

Not an `AutoModel` — `TinyModel` is a 3-file Gemma-shaped decoder (RMSNorm, RoPE,
GQA, gated FFN, tied embeddings), shipped in this repo under `tiny_model_v11/`.

```python
import json, torch
from huggingface_hub import snapshot_download
from safetensors.torch import load_file
from transformers import AutoTokenizer

path = snapshot_download("chrishayuk/v11-tinystories-115m-base")

import sys; sys.path.insert(0, path)
from tiny_model_v11 import TinyModel

cfg = json.load(open(f"{path}/config.json"))
model = TinyModel(
    vocab_size=cfg["vocab_size"], dim=cfg["dim"], n_layers=cfg["n_layers"],
    ffn_dim=cfg["ffn_dim"], n_heads=cfg["n_heads"], n_kv_heads=cfg["n_kv_heads"],
    max_seq=cfg["max_seq"],
)
model.load_state_dict(load_file(f"{path}/model.safetensors"))
model.eval()

tok = AutoTokenizer.from_pretrained("chrishayuk/v11-tinystories-115m-base")
ids = [tok.convert_tokens_to_ids("<s>")] + tok("Once upon a time", add_special_tokens=False)["input_ids"]
for _ in range(40):
    logits = model(torch.tensor([ids[-cfg["max_seq"]:]]))[0, -1]
    ids.append(int(logits.argmax()))
print(tok.decode(ids))
```

That exact round-trip — download, build, load, generate — is run against the
uploaded files at publish time. It is not an untested snippet.

## Architecture

| | |
|---|---|
| Parameters | 115,149,312 |
| Layers | 20 |
| Model dim | 512 |
| Attention heads | 8 (4 KV heads, GQA) |
| FFN dim | 2048 |
| Context | 256 tokens |
| Vocabulary | 71,260 |
| Embeddings | tied (`lm_head.weight is embed.weight`) |

The embedding table is 36.5M parameters — **32% of the
whole model is its vocabulary lookup**, which is what a 71k vocabulary costs at
this width.

`rope_freqs` is a complex64 buffer in the state dict. It is derived from
`dim`/`n_heads`/`max_seq` and recomputed on construction, so it round-trips but
carries no learned information.

## Identity

**Identity is the content hash, not the Hub revision** — re-pushing identical
bytes mints a new commit oid, and a README edit does too. Join on these:

| | |
|---|---|
| `model.safetensors` sha256 | `1841e0581574629716b646dacd4e70feaca153a8adc5ecb0b77e0e2ebdf78d9c` |
| `tokenizer.json` sha256 | `10dd51100331ab503115db23eee7e8dc3e360e3aed697c8a2e1b12b8f46031ae` |
| Tokenizer repo | [`chrishayuk/v11-tokenizer`](https://huggingface.co/chrishayuk/v11-tokenizer) |
| Source | [tinystories-train-video](https://github.com/chrishayuk/tinystories-train-video) |
| Source commit | `fbb5418` |

The tokenizer sha is the **same value** this checkpoint's training run wrote into
its `meta.json` as `tokenizer_hash`, and the same one
[`chrishayuk/v11-tokenizer`](https://huggingface.co/chrishayuk/v11-tokenizer) publishes. A
checkpoint driven by a different tokenizer produces fluent nonsense rather than
an error, so that join is checked mechanically at publish time, not asserted here.

## Training

| | |
|---|---|
| Corpus | [`roneneldan/TinyStories`](https://huggingface.co/datasets/roneneldan/TinyStories) @ `f54c09fd2331…` |
| Tokens | 16M |
| Steps | 15,625 |
| Batch × context | 4 × 256 |
| Optimiser | AdamW, lr 0.0003, weight decay 0.01, grad clip 1.0 |
| LR schedule | linear warmup then linear decay to 5% |
| Seed | 42 |
| Precision | fp32 |

The dataset revision is pinned, so the document set is reproducible and held-out
text can be shown never to have been trained on.

## Capability emergence

`emergence.json` carries the generations captured at each milestone, plus the
loss trace. Greedy, 30 new tokens, same prompts throughout:

| Tokens | Step | First sample continuation |
|---|---|---|
| 0.00M | 0 | simple_expressionesauesauesauesauesauesauesauesauesauesauesauesauesauesauesaumarredmarredmarredmarredmarredmar |
| 0.10M | 97 | .............................. |
| 1.00M | 976 | , there was a little girl named Lily. She loved to play with her toys and her friends. One day, L |
| 2.00M | 1953 | , there was a little girl named Lily. She loved to play outside and play with her friends. One day, Li |
| 5.00M | 4882 | , there was a little girl named Lily. She loved to play outside in the park. One day, she saw a big, |
| 8.00M | 7812 | , there was a little girl named Lily. She loved to play outside in the sunshine. One day, she saw a big, |
| 12.00M | 11718 | , there was a little girl named Lily. She loved to play outside in the sun. One day, she saw a big, |
| 16.00M | 15625 | , there was a little girl named Lily. She loved to play outside in the sun. One day, she saw a big, |

Only the final row's weights are published here; the earlier rows are the same
run mid-flight.

## What this model cannot do

It cannot do arithmetic. Nothing in TinyStories teaches addition, and number words
in that corpus are narrative texture rather than quantities — "once upon a time
there were two" is an idiom the model learns the way it learns "happily ever
after".

The interesting part is *how* it fails. It does not answer with a wrong number; it
carries on telling the story, straight past the place a number belongs.

Its own generation at the final milestone, greedy, from this run:

> *Lily had three apples. Tom gave her four more. Now Lily has* **a big piece of paper. She likes the color. Tom likes the color. He likes the**

It has also seen 16M tokens, which is **not converged**. Continued
training on more or less anything improves it, so do not read an improvement after
mid-training as evidence that the mid-training data helped specifically.

## Intended use

Research and teaching on compact language models: mid-training, tool-use /
tool-call training, and measuring the difference between memorising a
distribution and learning an algorithm. Not intended for any production use, and
it has no safety training of any kind.

## Provenance

`provenance.json` records the model and tokenizer hashes, the corpus pin, and the
run config. The chuk-datasets catalog holds a content-addressed, bit-reproducible
tokenization of the same corpus (`tiny-model/v11-rust-tokenized-phase1`); these
weights came from the pinned HF revision instead, which is reproducible given the
seed but not bit-identical. That distinction is recorded rather than glossed.