Jay Alammar writes visual explanations of machine learning concepts, including The Illustrated Transformer and The Illustrated BERT, ELMo, and co., first on a technical blog and now on the Substack newsletter Language Models & Co., which covers large language models, their internals, and applications. Jay Alammar co-wrote the illustrated book Hands-On Large Language Models, and the book's site lists Jay as Director and Engineering Fellow at Cohere.1234
At a glance
- Current roles
- Director and Engineering Fellow +1 more
- Companies
- Cohere, Language Models & Co.
- Sector
- Company
- Work listed
- 3
- Sources cited
- 10
- Profile reviewed
Channel and publications
Jay Alammar's technical blog explains machine learning ideas through diagrams and animations. Posts include The Illustrated Transformer (June 2018) and The Illustrated BERT, ELMo, and co. (December 2018), which the blog's about page notes are referenced in university AI courses, along with The Illustrated GPT-2 (2019), a visual explanation of how GPT-3 works (2020) and The Illustrated Stable Diffusion (2022).256789
Alammar later froze the blog and moved new writing to the Substack newsletter Language Models & Co., which covers large language models, their internals and applications. The blog's final post points readers to The Illustrated DeepSeek R-1 on the newsletter and to the course How Transformer LLMs Work.13
Book and courses
With Maarten Grootendorst, Alammar co-wrote Hands-On Large Language Models, an illustrated guide to language models with more than 275 custom figures and accompanying code. The book's author page describes Alammar as a co-creator of machine learning and natural language processing courses on DeepLearning.AI and Udacity.4
Work at Cohere
In a March 2022 post, Alammar wrote of having joined Cohere a little under a year earlier and listed articles written for developers there, including an introduction to large language models, a visual guide to prompt engineering and tutorials on summarization and semantic search. The book's site now lists Alammar as Director and Engineering Fellow at Cohere.104
Work and contributions
Language Models & Co. Show, channel or publication
Writes this Substack newsletter on large language models, their internals, and applications, which replaced the earlier blog.31
The Illustrated Transformer Show, channel or publication
Illustrated blog post explaining the Transformer architecture, one of several visual machine learning guides on Jay Alammar's blog.2
Hands-On Large Language Models Show, channel or publication
Co-author of an illustrated book for Python developers on the tools and concepts for using large language models.4
Timeline
- Published The Illustrated Transformer on the jalammar.github.io blog.5
- Published The Illustrated BERT, ELMo, and co., a visual guide to transfer learning in NLP.6
- Published The Illustrated GPT-2, a visual explanation of transformer language models.7
- Published a visual, animated explanation of how GPT-3 works.8
- Described joining Cohere and the developer articles written there on applying large language models.10
- Published The Illustrated Stable Diffusion, a gentle introduction to how the model works.9
Where they work
- Cohere 5 people in the wiki
- Language Models & Co. 1 person in the wiki
Related people
- Aidan GomezAlso at Cohere
- Nils ReimersAlso at Cohere
- Nick FrosstAlso at Cohere
- Joelle PineauAlso at Cohere
- Maxime LabonneLanguage models · Teaching and writing
- Simon WillisonLanguage models · Teaching and writing
- Sasha RushLanguage models · Teaching and writing
- Lilian WengTeaching and writing · Language models
- Zvi MowshowitzTeaching and writing · Language models
- Wes RothTeaching and writing · Language models
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References
10 sources · profile reviewed Oct 21, 2026 · data updated Oct 21, 2026
- Jay Alammar – Visualizing machine learning one concept at a time
- About – Jay Alammar
- About - Language Models & Co.
- Hands-On Large Language Models
- The Illustrated Transformer
- The Illustrated BERT, ELMo, and co. (How NLP Cracked Transfer Learning)
- The Illustrated GPT-2 (Visualizing Transformer Language Models)
- How GPT3 Works - Visualizations and Animations
- The Illustrated Stable Diffusion
- Applying massive language models in the real world with Cohere