Building makemore Part 5: Building a WaveNet

From the creator

We take the 2-layer MLP from previous video and make it deeper with a tree-like structure, arriving at a convolutional neural network architecture similar to the WaveNet (2016) from DeepMind. In the WaveNet paper, the same hierarchical architecture is implemented more efficiently using causal dilated convolutions (not yet covered). Along the way we get a better sense of torch.nn and what it is and how it works under the hood, and what a typical deep learning development process looks like (a lot of reading of documentation, keeping track of multidimensional tensor shapes, moving between jupyter notebooks and repository code, ...). Links: - makemore on github: https://github.com/karpathy/makemore - jupyter notebook I built in this video: https://github.com/karpathy/nn-zero-to-hero/blob/master/lectures/makemore/makemore_part5_cnn1.ipynb - collab notebook: https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1CXVEmCO_7r7WYZGb5qnjfyxTvQa13g5X?usp=sharing - my website: https://karpathy.ai - my twitter: https://twitter.com/karpathy - our Discord channel: https://discord.gg/3zy8kqD9Cp Supplementary links: - WaveNet 2016 from DeepMind https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.03499 - Bengio et al. 2003 MLP LM https://www.jmlr.org/papers/volume3/bengio03a/bengio03a.pdf Chapters: intro 00:00:00 intro 00:01:40 starter code walkthrough 00:06:56 let’s fix the learning rate plot 00:09:16 pytorchifying our code: layers, containers, torch.nn, fun bugs implementing wavenet 00:17:11 overview: WaveNet 00:19:33 dataset bump the context size to 8 00:19:55 re-running baseline code on block_size 8 00:21:36 implementing WaveNet 00:37:41 training the WaveNet: first pass 00:38:50 fixing batchnorm1d bug 00:45:21 re-training WaveNet with bug fix 00:46:07 scaling up our WaveNet conclusions 00:46:58 experimental harness 00:47:44 WaveNet but with “dilated causal convolutions” 00:51:34 torch.nn 00:52:28 the development process of building deep neural nets 00:54:17 going forward 00:55:26 improve on my loss! how far can we improve a WaveNet on this data?

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Makers residency 4th edition

Your idea can be anything. At our last workshops, people built plant-based nutrition businesses, a way to measure planetary resilience, crochet headwear and a way to connect lonely people living in the same building. An asset manager went on to raise an additional £25M on their fund within nine months. The fourth workshop is a full day at KOKO with Nick Sarafa, learning to build with Claude Code. Bring the thing you keep meaning to start. We’ll bring the pizza.

◆ Fri 13 Nov 2026 ◆ KOKO, London
Makers residency 4th edition
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Makers residency 4th edition
Fri 13 Nov 2026

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