nanoGPT speedrun

Placeholder. This benchmark is here so the benchmark panel can be tried out. Its baseline is from the blueprint or the literature as of 2026-10-19 and must be checked again; every route and score after it is made up.

Task

Train a 124M-parameter GPT-2 on FineWeb until it reaches 3.28 cross-entropy on the validation set, as fast as possible on eight H100s, after Keller Jordan’s modded-nanogpt speedrun and the AlgoPerf benchmark. Routes change the optimizer, the architecture, the schedule or the kernels; the verifier reruns training on the pinned runner and reports the wall-clock minutes to the target. The baseline is the llm.c reproduction at 45 minutes.

How to take part

Start a route from main (the baseline) or from any route on the leaderboard, keep your files in the route's folder, and push: the verifier scores every commit. Say what your route changes with tags, and keep the misses: a route that scores worse is a result too.