Sebastian Raschka

Career

Raschka was a professor in the Department of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, teaching statistics, machine learning and deep learning and doing research on deep neural networks. Raschka later worked as a senior engineer at Lightning AI and now describes the current work as that of an LLM research engineer, focused on LLM architectures and small-scale training.²¹

Raschka's research publications include work on rank-consistent ordinal regression with deep neural networks and machine learning classifiers for predicting protein–protein interaction hot spots, and a 2026 preprint with Sten Rüdiger comparing a fine-tuning method called MiCA with LoRA and full fine-tuning.⁴

Teaching and writing

Raschka's book Python Machine Learning was published by Packt in 2015 and followed by second and third editions with Vahid Mirjalili, and by Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn in 2022 with Yuxi (Hayden) Liu and Mirjalili. In 2024 Raschka published Machine Learning Q and AI with No Starch Press and Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) with Manning.⁴⁵

The Manning sequel, Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch), starts from a pretrained model and implements inference-time scaling, reinforcement learning training and distillation in code. Each of the from-scratch books has an official code repository on GitHub, and Raschka's site also hosts a blog, course materials and an LLM Gallery.⁵⁶³¹

Work and contributions

• LLMs-from-scratch Open-source code

  Official code repository for Raschka's book Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch), containing code for developing, pretraining and fine-tuning a GPT-like LLM in PyTorch without external LLM libraries; the main chapter code is designed to run on conventional laptops. Licensed under Apache-2.0.³⁷¹

Timeline

1. 2015Published Python Machine Learning with Packt Publishing.⁴
2. 2017Published the second edition of Python Machine Learning with Vahid Mirjalili.⁴
3. 2019Published the third edition of Python Machine Learning with Vahid Mirjalili.⁴
4. 2022Published Machine Learning with PyTorch and Scikit-Learn with Packt Publishing.⁴
5. 2024Published Machine Learning Q and AI with No Starch Press.⁴
6. 2024Published Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) with Manning Publications.⁴

Documented roles

The sources do not confirm a current role; these are the roles they document.

• Senior engineer, Lightning AI¹²
• Statistics professor, University of Wisconsin-Madison¹²

Companies in their history

• Lightning AI 3 people in the wiki

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