Phase 0 · ≈ 1 week
Orientation
Kill the "I don't know where to start" paralysis by shipping a trained model in your first few days, set up a research environment you'll actually keep, and start the two habits — a log and reading — that run through every later phase.
What to learn · in priority order
- 1
Environment (half a day)
Python + PyTorch. A single consumer GPU, or free Colab/Kaggle to start — don't spend money yet. Confirm torch sees your GPU/MPS. Don't over-build the setup; you'll redo it later.
- 2
First vertical slice (1–2 days)
Run the fast.ai Lesson 1 notebook, or train nanoGPT on tiny-shakespeare following the README (nanoGPT is deprecated but frozen — ideal for a first run: it will never change under you). Watch a real training loop run and a loss curve drop. You will not understand most of it. That's fine.
- 3
Public scaffolding (half a day)
A GitHub repo (e.g. learning-ml), a research log (LOG.md — one entry per session; the single highest-ROI habit in the roadmap), and a paper-notes folder.
- 4
Join one community (1 hour)
The EleutherAI Discord (#beginners / #research) is the highest-signal home for independent model researchers. Make an account, read, don't post yet.
- 5
Set your target (1 hour)
Re-read the Levels ladder. Write one line in your log: "My 6-month target is L2 — run a clean extension of a small-models result." Vague goals produce vague effort.
Primary path · use these, not ten others
fast.ai Lesson 1 or nanoGPT on tiny-shakespeare ↗
Either gets a real loss curve dropping on day one. Pick one, run it today.
TinyStories (arXiv 2305.07759) ↗
Your first figures-first paper skim — short and motivating.
The deliverable
A public repo with a loss curve screenshot and a started LOG.md. Trained something end-to-end, even without understanding it yet.
Milestones · check only when you can do it from a blank file
0/5 shippedartifact: A public repo with a loss curve and a log.
rule: every phase must end with a public artifact (repo + writeup). no artifact → phase not done, regardless of what you've watched.
Traps
✗Tooling rabbit holes
Don't spend the week on the perfect dev environment, dotfiles, or a GPU rig. Colab is fine for now.
✗"I need to understand it first"
No. Run it, then understand it. Inverting that instinct is the whole point of this week.
✗Skipping the log
The log is your external memory and the raw material of your first writeups. Start it now or you never will.