You're right to be sceptical. I have trained reasonably good SLMs for the TinyStories dataset on my 4060Ti (16GB) with no problems. You'll only encounter problems if you want to try if your ideas scale up to models any bigger than "arguably tiny".

TA here. Definitely not! In fact we explicitly added sections in the first assignment to allow for scaling down to even local compute (M-series GPUs). For assignment 2 there are a few regions that require Triton support for your GPU, but everything can be adapted for much cheaper GPUs.

We were lucky enough to get Blackwell GPUs for Stanford students this year, which is why the writeups are written mostly around them.

It seems strange that the required resources aren't provided by the educational institution?

You dont even need a GPU to train your own LLM.

I beliee these are affordable enough for the intended audience (which is Stanford undergrad/master)