Build PyTorch to Understand PyTorch - Vijay Janapa Reddi, Harvard University; Andrea Mattia Garavagno, University of Genoa
PyTorch's success depends on more than users—it needs engineers who understand what's inside. Engineers who can debug framework issues, optimize at the systems level, contribute upstream, and build what comes next. But ML education today produces practitioners who call APIs without understanding them. They train models without knowing why Adam needs 3× the memory of SGD, or what happens when they call loss.backward().
TinyTorch is a 20-module open-source curriculum that closes this gap. Students construct PyTorch's core components—tensors, autograd, optimizers, CNNs, transformers—in pure Python, building a complete framework where every operation is code they wrote. By the final module, they don't just use PyTorch; they understand how to build it.
The curriculum uses progressive disclosure, systems-first profiling from Module 01, and build-to-validate milestones—recreating ML breakthroughs from Perceptron (1958) through Transformers (2017), culminating in MLPerf-style benchmarking.
TinyTorch is how we grow the next generation of PyTorch contributors and the engineers who will build what comes after.
Open source: mlsysbook.ai/tinytorch