New Book on Language Models by Andriy Burkov

Three chapters are online, more to come over the coming weeks

Large language models have taken the world by storm, transforming industries, education, and creativity. They are among the most impactful inventions I have ever witnessed, rivaled only by the Internet and the smartphone.

As an author, I couldn't ignore such an important development, but I waited for the technology to mature before writing a book on it. And now, I believe the time has come. After almost six months of hard work, I'm thrilled to announce that the first three chapters of The Hundred-Page Language Models Book are now available online.

Over the coming weeks, I plan to release the subsequent chapters.

This book is the second in the series of "The Hundred-Page" books, but it's different from the first one. The main difference is that the new book is hands-on. And I must say that writing a hands-on book was much more difficult than I could have imagined. Not only must the code be correct, but it also has to be concise so that it fits in a book, yet as self-descriptive as possible. I believe I achieved that balance.

I wanted this book to be a comprehensive, practical guide to working with language using machines. So, you’ll not only learn about transformers but also about early count-based models and recurrent neural networks, which have made a strong comeback this year as a language modeling architecture.

The book is full of illustrations and trivia, ensuring the reader is never bored. It's dense with information, just like its predecessor, but every word you read is worth it.

As with all my books, this one is distributed on the read-first, buy-later principle, meaning that its chapters are—and will always remain—available to read from its official website. I strongly believe that books must be allowed to be read before buying and that knowledge should never be hidden behind a paywall.

As a self-publishing author, I want to say thank you to the early volunteering proofreaders. I will make sure to mention everyone in the Acknowledgement section of the book once it's ready for publishing. Writing a good book is a significant effort—hundreds of hours that the author spends in front of a screen and doesn’t spend with family and friends. If you would like to help improve the book’s quality and make yourself part of its future, you are invited to leave your comments on the book’s chapters. I read all the comments and make improvements wherever there's an opportunity.

Enjoy the reading, and let me know what you think! I really want to know.