Comment by killerstorm

You're missing the point.

Karpathy has other projects, e.g. : https://github.com/karpathy/nanochat

You can train a model with GPT-2 level of capability for $20-$100.

But, guess what, that's exactly what thousands of AI researchers have been doing for the past 5+ years. They've been training smallish models. And while these smallish models might be good for classification and whatnot, people strongly prefer big-ass frontier models for code generation.