Carloscodix/qapla is a char-level transformer model trained from scratch on an $8 ESP32-S3 chip, capable of running the full training loop with backpropagation implemented in C. This project demonstrates that training a model does not always require expensive GPUs or datacenters, as a low-cost microcontroller can suffice.

A 28.9 million parameter language model generates text on the ESP32-S3 microcontroller, which costs about $8. The model operates entirely on the chip without server communication, displaying output on a small screen at approximately 9 tokens per second.