Linear Digressions

Everyone talks about training the model — the data, the compute, the alignment magic. But what happens after the weights are frozen and millions of users start hammering it with prompts? That's inference, and it's a surprisingly deep rabbit hole of engineering challenges that rarely gets the spotlight it deserves. This week I kick off a new series unpacking the full inference ecosystem — from the moment a model completes training to the moment tokens land in your hands.

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Back in Two Weeks by Katie Malone

As AI systems grow more powerful, they grow harder to understand — and that tradeoff has never mattered more. Most interpretability tricks give us approximations from the outside, but mechanistic interpretability takes a different approach: cracking open the model itself to trace *why* it behaves the way it does. This episode digs into what makes mechanistic interpretability fundamentally different from other explainability methods, and why it might be the most promising path toward actually understanding what's happening inside modern LLMs.

Labeled data is expensive, slow, and painfully hard to come by — and when you're trying to evaluate whether an AI workflow is actually doing what you want, the problem gets even messier. How do you judge whether a chatbot response was helpful, honest, or hallucination-free at scale? This episode digs into using LLMs as judges: letting the models themselves evaluate the quality of AI outputs, from simple chat exchanges all the way to complex multi-step agent behavior.