# Jay Alammar

> Jay Alammar is a Toronto-based AI educator, visual writer, author, and director and engineering fellow at Cohere. His 2018 post The Illustrated Transformer helped make transformer architecture approachable, and his later courses, open source work, and books with Maarten Grootendorst extend that method to language models and AI agents.

- **Role:** Director and Engineering Fellow at Cohere
- **Organizations:** Cohere, Udacity, STV, Qaym
- **Nationality:** Saudi Arabian
- **Education:** Computer science, University of Kansas
- **Known for:** Created The Illustrated Transformer, referenced in AI and machine learning courses at MIT and Cornell., Coauthored Hands-On Large Language Models and An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents with Maarten Grootendorst., Created machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing learning material for Udacity programs.

## Career timeline

- **2006** — Launched Qaym, a restaurant review website in Saudi Arabia.
- **2018** — Published The Illustrated Transformer on his personal blog.
- **2019** — Presented a QCon London talk on word embeddings and recommendation systems.
- **2021** — Joined Cohere around this period and began creating practical language model education for developers.
- **2024** — Coauthored Hands-On Large Language Models with Maarten Grootendorst.
- **2025** — Pointed readers to a new animated short course on transformer language models and shifted new writing to Substack.
- **2026** — Coauthored An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents; the ebook was published in September.

## Achievements

- Created The Illustrated Transformer, referenced in AI and machine learning courses at MIT and Cornell.
- Coauthored Hands-On Large Language Models and An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents with Maarten Grootendorst.
- Created machine learning, deep learning, and natural language processing learning material for Udacity programs.
- Developed Ecco, an open source package for exploring language model behavior.
- Contributed visual documentation that was incorporated into pandas documentation.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — The ebook An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents, coauthored with Maarten Grootendorst, was published.
- **2025-01** — Discussed AI education, retrieval, and practical deployment in a Data Science Dojo interview.

## Links

- Website: https://jalammar.github.io/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jalammar/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/JayAlammar
- GitHub: https://github.com/jalammar
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCmOwsoHty5PrmE-3QhUBfPQ
- Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/jayalammar.bsky.social

---

Profile page: https://yespress.io/jay-alammar
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29