# Jimmy Ba

> Jimmy Ba is a University of Toronto computer science professor and former xAI co-founder. He co-authored the Adam optimizer with Diederik Kingma and led the Layer Normalization paper with Jamie Ryan Kiros and Geoffrey Hinton. Adam won ICLR’s 2025 Test of Time Award. Ba announced his departure from xAI in February 2026.

- **Role:** Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto
- **Organizations:** University of Toronto, Vector Institute, CIFAR, xAI, Microsoft Research, Google DeepMind
- **Education:** Bachelor of Applied Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, Master of Applied Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto, PhD, Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Toronto
- **Known for:** Co-author of the Adam optimizer with Diederik P. Kingma., First author of Layer Normalization with Jamie Ryan Kiros and Geoffrey Hinton., ICLR 2025 Test of Time Award for Adam.

## Career timeline

- **2013** — Published Adaptive Dropout for Training Deep Neural Networks with Brendan Frey.
- **2014** — Co-authored Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization with Diederik P. Kingma.
- **2016** — Published Layer Normalization with Jamie Ryan Kiros and Geoffrey Hinton.
- **2018** — Completed his Toronto PhD and joined the university’s computer science faculty.
- **2023** — Named an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow and joined xAI’s founding team.
- **2024** — Promoted to associate professor with tenure at the University of Toronto, effective July 1.
- **2025** — Adam received ICLR’s Test of Time Award; Ba appeared at the Grok 4 launch.
- **2026** — Announced his departure from xAI in February.

## Achievements

- Co-author of the Adam optimizer with Diederik P. Kingma.
- First author of Layer Normalization with Jamie Ryan Kiros and Geoffrey Hinton.
- ICLR 2025 Test of Time Award for Adam.
- Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship, announced in 2023.
- Canada CIFAR AI Chair and Vector Institute faculty member.
- Co-founder of xAI.

## Latest updates

- **2026-02** — Announced his last day at xAI and thanked the team in a public post.
- **2025-11** — Appeared at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit and discussed his near-missed appearance after a wrong turn onto the Bay Bridge.
- **2025-07** — Appeared during the Grok 4 launch presentation.
- **2025-04** — Adam, co-authored with Diederik P. Kingma, won ICLR’s Test of Time Award.

## Links

- Website: https://jimmylba.github.io/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/jimmybajimmyba
- GitHub: https://github.com/jimmylba

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