Grant Sanderson
Math Educator (3Blue1Brown)
Creator of the 3Blue1Brown math-animation channel (8M+ subscribers), whose visual deep-learning series — including 2024’s “But what is a GPT?” — has become the canonical explainer teaching how neural networks and transformers actually work.
In his words
To try to understand what these models are doing, it ends up being really fruitful to think about those long lists of numbers that the words turn into as being points in a space. That’s all to say, high dimensions are useful.
Teaching is one of the most stable post-AGI jobs that there is, because it’s so relational.
Biography
Grant Sanderson studied math and computer science at Stanford, produced multivariable-calculus content for Khan Academy, and in 2015 launched 3Blue1Brown — a YouTube channel that grew past eight million subscribers by animating the intuition behind mathematics. His programmatic animation library and lecture work (including courses at MIT) made him arguably the most influential math communicator of the YouTube era.
Teaching the machine to a mass audience
Sanderson’s neural-network series, begun in 2017, became a rite of passage for a generation of machine-learning students. In April 2024 he extended it with “But what is a GPT? Visual intro to transformers,” writing that transformers — “the neural network architecture behind large language models and so many other tools in the modern wave of AI” — had been one of the most requested topics on the channel for years. The chapters on attention and language models rank among the most-watched technical explanations of how systems like ChatGPT work.
His stance is enthusiasm through understanding rather than boosterism. On the Dwarkesh Podcast in June 2026 he assessed AI’s gold-medal performance on the International Math Olympiad soberly — progress is “spiky,” with geometry effectively solved while conjecture-generation and reframing questions remain human strengths — and he is openly skeptical of the term AGI itself, telling the same interviewer that ten people asked to define it would give ten different answers. Yet he keeps building the explainers that demystify the technology, and argues math education matters more, not less, in an AI era.
Alongside Károly Zsolnai-Fehér, Sanderson represents the educational wing of AI optimism: creators whose response to a confusing technology is to open the hood and show everyone the mechanism.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/grant-sanderson