# Maarten Grootendorst

> Maarten Grootendorst is a psychologist-turned-ML engineer at Google DeepMind, best known for creating BERTopic, KeyBERT, and PolyFuzz - open-source NLP tools with over 15 million combined downloads. Co-author of the Amazon #1 bestseller 'Hands-On Large Language Models' (O'Reilly, 2024) with Jay Alammar, he runs the 'Exploring Language Models' newsletter with 2M+ views and has taught 50,000+ students on DeepLearning.AI. His work bridges the worlds of psychology and AI, making complex language model internals accessible through strikingly visual guides.

- **Role:** Developer Relations Engineer at Google DeepMind
- **Organizations:** Google DeepMind, O'Reilly Media, DeepLearning.AI
- **Nationality:** Dutch
- **Education:** MSc Data Science & Entrepreneurship (cum laude), Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS), MSc Organizational Psychology (cum laude), Tilburg University, MSc Clinical Psychology (cum laude), Tilburg University
- **Known for:** Creator of BERTopic (7,600+ GitHub stars), the leading neural topic modeling library using BERT and c-TF-IDF, Creator of KeyBERT (4,200+ GitHub stars) - minimal keyword extraction with BERT, Creator of PolyFuzz - fuzzy string matching and evaluation toolkit

## Career timeline

- **2017** — Enrolled at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS) for MSc Data Science
- **2019** — Graduated from JADS cum laude; began career in data science
- **2020** — Released KeyBERT - minimal keyword extraction using BERT embeddings
- **2022** — Released BERTopic and published accompanying academic paper on arXiv; began writing extensively on Medium and Substack
- **2023** — BERTopic surpassed 10M+ combined downloads across open-source NLP projects; launched 'Exploring Language Models' newsletter
- **2024** — Co-authored 'Hands-On Large Language Models' with Jay Alammar (O'Reilly), which became an Amazon #1 bestseller; newsletter reached 2M+ views
- **2025** — Joined Google DeepMind as Developer Relations Engineer; announced 'An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents' (O'Reilly, co-authored with Jay Alammar)

## Achievements

- Creator of BERTopic (7,600+ GitHub stars), the leading neural topic modeling library using BERT and c-TF-IDF
- Creator of KeyBERT (4,200+ GitHub stars) - minimal keyword extraction with BERT
- Creator of PolyFuzz - fuzzy string matching and evaluation toolkit
- Open-source NLP projects collectively exceed 15 million downloads
- Co-authored 'Hands-On Large Language Models' (O'Reilly, 2024) - Amazon #1 bestseller in Data Modeling and NLP
- Co-authoring 'An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents' (O'Reilly, 2025/2026) with Jay Alammar
- Official Hands-On LLM GitHub repository has 25,300+ stars
- Newsletter 'Exploring Language Models' surpassed 2 million total views
- Academic publications cited 3,000+ times on Google Scholar
- Taught 50,000+ students via DeepLearning.AI and Analytics Vidhya courses
- Joined Google DeepMind as Developer Relations Engineer (2025)
- Three MSc degrees, all completed cum laude

## Latest updates

- **2025-04** — Joined Google DeepMind as Developer Relations Engineer
- **2025-04** — Announced 'An Illustrated Guide to AI Agents' co-authored with Jay Alammar (O'Reilly)
- **2025-04** — Published 'A Visual Guide to Gemma 4' on newsletter
- **2024-10** — 'Hands-On Large Language Models' (O'Reilly) published; became Amazon #1 bestseller
- **2024-10** — Published 'A Visual Guide to Mixture of Experts (MoE)'
- **2024-07** — Published 'A Visual Guide to Quantization'

## Links

- Website: https://www.maartengrootendorst.com/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mgrootendorst/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/MaartenGr
- GitHub: https://github.com/MaartenGr
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@MaartenGrootendorst

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/maarten-grootendorst
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-04-21