Episode · Lex Fridman Podcast · 2026-02-01
Books mentioned on #490 – State of AI in 2026: LLMs, Coding, Scaling Laws, China, Agents, GPUs, AGI
Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka are machine learning researchers, engineers, and educators. Nathan is the post-training lead at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) and the author of The RLHF Book.
Books mentioned, in the order they came up
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Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch)
Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka is a technical programming guide that teaches readers how to construct and understand large language models.
Recommended“A couple of them that I wanted to mention—which is a book I highly recommend—Build a Large Language Model from Scratch, and the new one, Build a Reasoning Model from Scratch.”
Where to get it
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Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch)
Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka is a technical guide that explores the creation and implementation of advanced artificial intelligence reasoning models.
Recommended“A couple of them that I wanted to mention—which is a book I highly recommend—Build a Large Language Model from Scratch, and the new one, Build a Reasoning Model from Scratch.”
Where to get it
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Season of the Witch
Season of the Witch by David Talbot is a sweeping historical narrative that chronicles the turbulent political, cultural, and social transformation of San Francisco from the 1960s through the mid-1980s.
Recommended“I need to get him a copy of Season of the Witch, which is a history of SF from 1960 to 1985, which goes through the hippie revolution... And it's just like, that is so recent, and so much turmoil and hurt, but also love in SF. And it's like, no one knows about this. It's a great book, Season”
Where to get it
