Interactive 3D and 2D Visualization of GPT-2
Get picks like this daily. Today's launch numbers, the top launches, AI and tech news, and a daily opportunity pick, straight to your inbox.
Want to reach these readers? Sponsor an issue.
I’ve been building an interactive 3D + 2D visualization of GPT-2. It displays real activations and attention scores extracted from GPT-2 Small (124M) during a forward pass. The goal is to make it easier to learn how LLMs work by showing what is happening inside the model.The 3D part is built with Three.js, and the 2D part is built with plain HTML/CSS/JS.Would love to hear your thoughts or feedback!
HN · launched Mar 19, 2026 · 12 upvotes (top 36%) · 2 views
Niche: data and scientific visualization tools · 146 launches, 3 in the last 7 days ▼ -50% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Education
- Observability & eval
- Developer
- AI-native
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 146 launches in data and scientific visualization tools →
Could you build this?
Partial A web frontend with Three.js can be vibe-coded, but faithfully running GPT-2 inference in the browser or extracting and visualizing exact tensor activations, attention weights, and KV cache states requires deep transformer understanding and WebGL/WebGPU shader mastery.
What it would actually take: The stack uses WebGPU or WebGL alongside Three.js/D3.js to render massive interactive matrix transformations, token activations, and attention heads in real time. The technical barrier is implementing high-performance client-side tensor operations (or streaming multi-layer transformer internal states without UI thread bottlenecks) and managing dynamic 3D scenes with hundreds of thousands of active nodes. This requires specialized knowledge in transformer architecture internals and graphics programming/GPU compute shaders.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 199 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #84 of 200 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 139 days after the earliest competitor.
- NanoEuler · hn · 2026-06-19 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- NanoEuler · hn · 2026-06-28 · 55 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- I built GPT from scratch to understand how it works · hn · 2026-01-14 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- The Two by Two Truth Diagram · hn · 2026-03-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Every number in a tiny GPT, from one forward pass to one step of RLHF · hn · 2026-10-07 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Seoul 3D Atlas v5.4 · ph · 2026-09-18 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- LLM Attention Visualization · hn · 2026-09-08 · 173 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- cellular stories · ph · 2026-09-14 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.42
The niche, labels, vibe code rating and competitor comparison on this page are analysis by Nicheloom. If you use them, please credit nicheloom.com. How you may use our data.