acknowledgments

First and foremost, thank you to my partner, Helena, for her unending support of this crazy project of mine during the intense early language modeling era post-ChatGPT. Without Helena and my immediate family, I would lack the confidence to take on these seemingly impossible goals. Helena had great help from Phoebe, our dog, to distract me from rabbit holes that went a little too deep.

Thank you to Caithrin Rintoul for pushing me through the process of professional-izing this book and getting the physical edition to exist. Thank you to Mia Ocolisanu for keeping me on top of the logistics and managing the multiparty communications and coordination process that is the book publishing process. Thank you to Florian Brand for helping me read the pulse of the community when iterating on and evolving the book.

Thank you to my core colleagues at Ai2 who helped me learn all this material and put it to good use. This phase of my learning about language models and sharing it with the world wouldn’t be close to a success without you. This core group includes Luca Soldaini, Kyle Lo, Dirk Groeneveld, Hanna Hajishirzi, Saumya Malik, and Ali Farhadi, but there are many, many others.