About the Authors
Hands-On Large Language Models was written by Jay Alammar and Maarten Grootendorst, who playfully dubbed this work “The Illustrated LLM Book”. Through the visually educational nature of this book and with almost 300 custom made figures, the authors bring practical tools and concepts you need to use Large Language Models today.Jay Alammar
Connect with Jay on LinkedIn
Maarten Grootendorst
Connect with Maarten on LinkedIn
Jay Alammar
Jay Alammar is known for his visual and intuitive explanations of complex machine learning concepts. His work focuses on making AI and NLP accessible through clear illustrations and step-by-step breakdowns.Other Works by Jay
The Illustrated Stable Diffusion
A visual guide to understanding how Stable Diffusion works
The Illustrated DeepSeek-R1
Visual explanation of the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model
Maarten Grootendorst
Maarten Grootendorst specializes in natural language processing and creating practical tools for working with text data. He shares his insights through detailed visual guides and technical articles.Other Works by Maarten
A Visual Guide to Mamba
Understanding Mamba and state space models
A Visual Guide to Quantization
How quantization works in language models
A Visual Guide to Mixture of Experts
Understanding MoE architectures
A Visual Guide to Reasoning LLMs
How reasoning works in large language models
What Experts Say
The book has received praise from leading figures in AI and machine learning:Andrew Ng - Founder of DeepLearning.AI
Andrew Ng - Founder of DeepLearning.AI
“Jay and Maarten have continued their tradition of providing beautifully illustrated and insightful descriptions of complex topics in their new book. Bolstered with working code, timelines, and references to key papers, their book is a valuable resource for anyone looking to understand the main techniques behind how Large Language Models are built.”
Nils Reimers - Director of Machine Learning at Cohere
Nils Reimers - Director of Machine Learning at Cohere
“This is an exceptional guide to the world of language models and their practical applications in industry. Its highly-visual coverage of generative, representational, and retrieval applications of language models empowers readers to quickly understand, use, and refine LLMs. Highly recommended!”
Josh Starmer - StatQuest
Josh Starmer - StatQuest
“I can’t think of another book that is more important to read right now. On every single page, I learned something that is critical to success in this era of language models.”
Luis Serrano, PhD - Founder and CEO of Serrano Academy
Luis Serrano, PhD - Founder and CEO of Serrano Academy
“If you’re looking to get up to speed in everything regarding LLMs, look no further! In this wonderful book, Jay and Maarten will take you from zero to expert in the history and latest advances in large language models. With very intuitive explanations, great real-life examples, clear illustrations, and comprehensive code labs, this book lifts the curtain on the complexities of transformer models, tokenizers, semantic search, RAG, and many other cutting-edge technologies. A must read for anyone interested in the latest AI technology!”
Leland McInnes - Researcher at the Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing
Leland McInnes - Researcher at the Tutte Institute for Mathematics and Computing
“Hands-On Large Language Models brings clarity and practical examples to cut through the hype of AI. It provides a wealth of great diagrams and visual aids to supplement the clear explanations. The worked examples and code make concrete what other books leave abstract. The book starts with simple introductory beginnings, and steadily builds in scope. By the final chapters, you will be fine-tuning and building your own large language models with confidence.”