About the Author

My name is Michael Brenndoerfer, and I'm grateful for the opportunity to share my passion for language AI with you through this book.

I hold a Master's degree in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering (EECS) from the University of California, Berkeley, and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science from DHBW Stuttgart.

I began my career as a Research Engineer at IBM Research, where I primarily worked on Machine Learning and Databases. During my tenure, I worked across multiple research facilities, including the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California, the MIT-IBM Watson AI Lab in Boston, Massachusetts, the IBM Research Lab in Zurich, Switzerland, and the IBM Research & Development Center in Böblingen, Germany.

Since then, my professional journey has spanned startups, software engineering, management consulting, and private equity. While my day-to-day work now spans domains beyond purely AI, my interest in language, cognition, and computational learning has remained a consistent thread.

This book is a personal attempt to reconnect with that curiosity. It's written with the hope of making complex ideas more accessible, especially to those who are excited by the potential of language AI but unsure where to start. I'm still learning, and I hope this book invites you to learn alongside me.