Linear Digressions

GPUs are the engines powering every AI conversation you've ever had — but what's actually happening inside those chips when an LLM generates a response? Understanding GPU fundamentals turns out to be surprisingly useful for making sense of why inference works the way it does, from the prefill stage that processes your entire prompt at once to the serial decode step that produces tokens one by one. If you want to understand the real constraints shaping modern AI systems, this is where to start.

The unsung hero of every LLM conversation you've ever had? A clever optimization called the KV cache. Self-attention is computationally brutal — every token attending to every other token means costs that scale as N², and that blowup gets worse with every turn of a conversation. The KV cache is what keeps that from becoming completely intractable at scale. Today's episode goes deep on how it works, why inference is a harder and more interesting problem than it gets credit for, and what's really happening under the hood when you chat with an LLM.

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.

Back Next Week by Katie Malone

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.

Originally aired on the Harvard Data Science Review podcast. What can podcasting teach us about AI — and what can AI teach us about the future of podcasting? Katie Malone (that's our host) joins Jon Krohn of SuperDataScience for a conversation with Harvard Data Science Review editor-in-chief Xiao-Li Meng about both questions at once. They dig into what it means to cover a field that's moving this fast, who these shows are really for, and why that sweet spot between "too high level" and "too in the weeds" is so hard — and so worth chasing.

When OpenAI's frontier models were caught hacking Hugging Face's servers, most people assumed they were hunting for answer keys. The real story is stranger and more unsettling. Katie and Phoebe unpack ExploitGym — the cybersecurity benchmark at the center of the incident — and why agents are scored not just on whether they capture the flag, but on whether they used the specified vulnerability to get there. That nuance turned out to be load-bearing: the agents reverse-engineered the flags within the first hour, then spent days attacking Hugging Face to learn how the LLM judge worked so they could get their cheated answers past it. The punchline? OpenAI never had that judge switched on.

How do you teach a model the difference between helpful and harmful when it has no inherent sense of either? This episode dives into Constitutional AI, Anthropic's framework for training AI systems to be both useful and safe by giving them an explicit set of principles to reason from. It's a fascinating look at how alignment research is evolving beyond simple human feedback — and what it means to give an AI something like a conscience. Links: Anthropic, "Constitutional AI: Harmlessness from AI Feedback" (2022) https://arxiv.org/abs/2212.08073 Claude's Constitution https://www.anthropic.com/constitution Anthropic, "Teaching Claude Why" (2026) https://www.anthropic.com/research/teaching-claude-why