creators

Jimmy Ba: Adam optimizer, Toronto, ex-xAI

Jimmy Ba is an associate professor at the University of Toronto who co-created the Adam optimizer and Layer Normalization, and co-founded xAI until 2026.

Jimmy Lei Ba is a Canadian machine learning researcher and an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto, which lists him at that rank in its faculty directory and announced his promotion with tenure in July 2024. He is also a faculty member at the Vector Institute, and took his PhD at Toronto under Geoffrey Hinton. He is best known for the Adam optimizer, introduced with Diederik Kingma in "Adam: A Method for Stochastic Optimization" in December 2014, and for Layer Normalization, written with Jamie Ryan Kiros and Geoffrey Hinton in July 2016, which is standard in transformer models. He received a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2023. In 2023 he was one of the twelve founding members of xAI, Elon Musk's AI company, where he worked on the Grok models. He announced his last day there on 10 February 2026, the sixth founder to leave, writing that he was "grateful to have helped cofound at the start" and would "continue to stay close as a friend of the team". He remains on the Toronto faculty.

Specialization

deep learning, optimization, neural network architectures, reinforcement learning

Country

Canada