Vanus AI - Educational Toy AI LLM
One of the interesting things you can do with the new AI LLM technology is rebuild AI with AI. Here is a project to take some of the python based technology and convert into Java, a small toy LLM in Java and Scala wrapper. It is not practical due to performance issues but you can see the use of basic procedural and OOP concepts for the LLM. Used AI for the documentation and generated code.
https://github.com/berlinbrown/vanus-play-ai-java
An educational decoder-only transformer implemented with Java numerical kernels,
Java autograd, and a small Scala command-line trainer. It uses no PyTorch,
pretrained weights, native BLAS, or external tokenizer.
Architecturally, yes: causal self-attention, RoPE, RMSNorm, SwiGLU, backprop through an autograd tape, AdamW, and autoregressive next-byte prediction via cross-entropy are the same pieces production transformers use (see Architecture below). Nothing special-cases words or does string matching; every response comes out of matrix multiplications over learned weights.

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