#490 - Nathan Lambert and Sebastian Raschka

31 Jan 2026

Books mentioned on Lex Fridman Podcast #490:

1. Build a Large Language Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka
2. Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch) by Sebastian Raschka
3. The RLHF Book: Reinforcement learning from human feedback, alignment, and post-training LLMs by Nathan Lambert
4. Apple in China: The Capture of the World’s Greatest Company by Patrick McGee
5. Boom: Bubbles and the End of Stagnation by Byrne Hobart, Tobias Huber
6. Season of the Witch: Enchantment, Terror and Deliverance in the City of Love by David Talbot

Nathan Lambert is a machine learning researcher who works on building, understanding, and advocating for open language models and other responsible autonomous systems. natolambert.com

• https://www.interconnects.ai/
• https://x.com/natolambert
• https://bsky.app/profile/natolambert.bsky.social
• https://www.threads.com/@natolambert
• https://github.com/natolambert
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/natolambert/
• https://www.youtube.com/@natolambert

Other appearances: #459

Sebastian Raschka is an LLM Research Engineer with over a decade of experience in artificial intelligence, bridging academia and industry through roles including senior engineer at Lightning AI and statistics professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. sebastianraschka.com

• https://x.com/rasbt
• https://github.com/rasbt
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebastianraschka/

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Watch or listen to episode #490