​AI Book Club Author Discussion: Sebastian Raschka | Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch)

​We just finished reading Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch) for August’s AI Book Club, and for this special session we’ll be joined by Sebastian Raschka for a live discussion about the book.

​Rather than a presentation, this will be a casual conversation about the ideas behind the book, what went into writing it, and the rapidly evolving world of reasoning models.

​We’ll talk about topics like inference-time scaling, self-refinement, reinforcement learning, GRPO, distillation, and what Sebastian has learned from building these techniques from scratch.

​Bring your questions! We’ll leave plenty of room for audience discussion, and you’re welcome to join even if you didn’t finish the book (or haven’t read it at all).

​About the Book

​Build a Reasoning Model (From Scratch) Author: Sebastian Raschka Published: July 2026

​The book is a practical guide to understanding how modern reasoning-oriented LLMs work by building their core techniques step by step.

​It starts with a pretrained language model and moves through text generation and evaluation, inference-time scaling and self-refinement, reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, GRPO improvements, and finally distillation into smaller reasoning models.

​Chapters 1 Understanding reasoning models 2 Generating text with a pretrained LLM 3 Evaluating reasoning models 4 Improving reasoning with inference-time scaling 5 Inference-time scaling via self-refinement 6 Training reasoning models with reinforcement learning 7 Improving GRPO for reinforcement learning 8 Distilling reasoning models for efficient reasoning

​Get the book: Manning: Promo code AIBookClub should give you 45% off https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-reasoning-model-from-scratch

​O’Reilly: https://learning.oreilly.com/library/view/build-a-reasoning/9781633434677/

​Want to keep discussing the book and other AI engineering topics? Join the Flyte MLOps Slack group.