Sebastian Raschka

Sebastian Raschka is a machine learning researcher and educator known for his accessible technical writing and his ability to explain frontier AI concepts clearly without sacrificing depth.

Notable Work

  • Build a Large Language Model From Scratch (2024) — widely-read book walking readers through implementing an LLM from first principles; aimed at practitioners wanting to understand what is happening inside transformer models
  • Independent educator and writer; publishes technical breakdowns of AI papers and techniques
  • ML researcher with hands-on experience in model training

Views on Architecture

Raschka’s consistent position: the transformer architecture is fundamentally unchanged from GPT-2. Modern frontier models are autoregressive decoder-only transformers with attention + FFN blocks — the core is the same; the innovations are engineering tweaks for efficiency and capacity (mixture-of-experts, GQA, MLA, RMSNorm, SwiGLU).

He views the “AGI” concept as continuous improvement (“amplification not paradigm change”), not a step-function transition.


Source: fridman-lambert-raschka-2026-state-of-ai