A new TinyStories model, significantly smaller than its predecessor, has been developed using a hybrid architecture of GRU and attention layers. Trained on a 20MB dataset with Google Colab's free resources, the model achieves a train loss of 2.2 and can generate coherent text by remembering context from 5-10 words ago. The architecture employs a residual memory logic within a single GRUcell layer and a self-attention layer, which enhances the model's ability to maintain context while remaining computationally efficient. Although the attention mechanism increases computational cost, the model still outperforms the larger TinyStories-1M in speed for short text bursts. This matters because it demonstrates how smaller, more efficient models can achieve comparable performance to larger ones, making advanced machine learning accessible with limited resources.
