Hi, my name is Jules. I’m a 15-year-old high school student from France, and I’m teaching myself how to build and train open-source language models.

After saving money for several months, I bought an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano Super with only 8GB of memory. Despite the hardware limitations, I used it to learn the full process of developing a language model: preparing data, designing the architecture, training, evaluating, optimizing, and publishing the result.

I have now released my first model, G0-nano-instruct, publicly on Hugging Face:

https://huggingface.co/AZERDSQ/G0-nano-instruct

G0 has 63 million parameters. It is a small first model, but it proved that I could complete the entire development pipeline independently on very limited hardware.

I am now preparing the next generation of the project, G1. Depending on the compute available, I am targeting a model between approximately 300 million and 2 billion parameters.

My current Jetson is no longer powerful enough for the experiments I want to run. My goal is therefore to raise enough money to purchase an NVIDIA DGX Spark, or an equivalent system based on the NVIDIA GB10 chip with 128GB of unified memory.

This machine would give me a permanent local environment where I could:

- train and fine-tune larger open-source models;

- test new architectures and datasets;

- publish benchmarks, checkpoints, and technical findings;

- document both successful and failed experiments;

- make the resulting models available publicly.

The fundraising target is approximately €5,000, covering the machine and the initial costs required to operate the project. If the full target is not reached, the funds will instead be used for cloud GPU compute, storage, and smaller-scale training experiments.

I will document the use of the funds and the development process publicly. This includes training configurations, compute costs, benchmarks, results, limitations, and failures.

Because I am under 18, the fundraiser and withdrawal of funds will be managed with the involvement of a parent or legal guardian.

Any support, contribution, technical advice, or introduction to a hardware partner would help me continue learning and building.

Thank you for supporting independent, open-source AI development.

Jules

Hugging Face:

https://huggingface.co/AZERDSQ