This book was made possible by people who invested in me early, without assurance of success. My thanks to Mike Bilodeau and Dannie Herzberg, who greenlit this project when I was supposed to be working on a dozen other priorities. More thanks to Tuhin Srivastava, Amir Haghighat, Phil Howes, Pankaj Gupta, and Emmilise von Avis, who hired me four years ago, even though I had no formal experience in the role. To Megha, for everything. And to my family, who has bet on me for my entire life.
Thank you to the many reviewers who helped me make this book as accurate and precise as possible: Raymond Cano, Tianshu Cheng, Tri Dao, Michael Feil, William Gao, Pankaj Gupta, Amir Haghighat, Mahmoud Hassan, Nidhi Hiremath, Phil Howes, Tyron Jung, Kaz Kato, Madison Kanna, Alex Ker, Harry Kim, Colin McGrath, Deepak Nagaraj, Eskil Olsen, Ed Shrager, Aaryam Sharma, and Joey Zwicker. Any errors that remain are my sole responsibility.
Thank you to Robin Bourjaily for editing this book, along with just about everything else I’ve ever written.
Thank you to Luke de Hass for the cover and internal illustrations, to Aaron Relph for design guidance, to Javier Crocco for internal illustrations, and to Raúl López for additional design assistance.
Thank you to the many researchers behind the open models, contributors to the open-source libraries, and authors of the papers mentioned in this book. You are the giants upon whose shoulders we stand.
And finally, my thanks to you, the reader, without whom I would merely be creating very elaborate training data.