This morning I wrote a post about the probability that a random matrix over a finite field is invertible. If the field has q elements and the matrix has dimensions n × n then the probability is In that post I made observation that p(q, n) converges very quickly as a function of n [1]. One way to see that the convergence is quick is to note that and John Baez pointed out in the comments that p(q, […]
GitLab Act 2 There’s a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the “workforce reduction” and “structural and strategic decisions” they are making with respect to the agentic era. They’re “planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams”. One of the most interesting things about GitLab is that they have employees spread across a large number of countries – 18 are listed in their public employee handbook but […]
Home Table of Contents Building and Training a Kimi-K2 Model Using DeepSeek-V3 Components Kimi-K2 vs DeepSeek-V3: Key Architecture Differences in LLM Design Mixture of Experts Scaling in Kimi-K2: Model Size, Sparsity, and Efficiency Attention Head Optimization in Kimi-K2 for Efficient Long-Context LLMs MuonClip Optimizer: Stabilizing Large-Scale LLM Training in Kimi-K2 Token Efficiency in LLM Training: Why It Matters for Kimi-K2 Attention Logit Explosion in LLMs: Training Instability and Challenges QK-Clip: Preventing Attention Logit Explosion in Kimi-K2 Training Training […]
Scaling large language models (LLMs) is expensive. Every token processed during inference and every gradient computed during training flows through feedforward layers that account for over two-thirds of model parameters and more than 80% of total FLOPs in larger models. A team researchers from Sakana AI and NVIDIA have worked on a new research that directly targets this bottleneck — not by changing the architecture, but by making the computation inside feedforward layers significantly cheaper through unstructured sparsity. […]
A team of researchers from Meta, Stanford University, and the University of Washington have introduced three new methods that substantially accelerate generation in the Byte Latent Transformer (BLT) — a language model architecture that operates directly on raw bytes instead of tokens. Byte-Level Models Are Slow at Inference To understand what this new research solves, you need to understand the tradeoff at the center of byte-level language modeling. Most language models today work on tokens — chunks of […]
A new method developed by MIT researchers can accelerate a privacy-preserving artificial intelligence training method by about 81 percent. This advance could enable a wider array of resource-constrained edge devices, like sensors and smartwatches, to deploy more accurate AI models while keeping user data secure. The MIT researchers boosted the efficiency of a technique known as federated learning, which involves a network of connected devices that work together to train a shared AI model. In federated learning, the […]
This post is co written by Ishan Goswami and Nitya Sridhar from Exa. If you are building web search-enabled AI agents for research, fact-checking, or competitive intelligence, access to current and reliable information is critical. Most general-purpose search APIs are not designed for agent workflows. They return HTML-heavy pages and short snippets optimized for human browsing, not structured data that an agent can directly consume. As a result, developers often need to build additional layers, custom crawlers, parsers, […]
The Federal Communications Commission is relenting a bit on its restrictive router rules, saying it will allow foreign-made routers to receive software and firmware updates until at least January 1, 2029. The FCC also expanded the waiver to cover more types of software updates. Previously, the FCC said routers currently on the market or already sold to consumers could receive security patches and other updates only until March 1, 2027. On Friday, the agency announced a waiver extension […]
A curious case in Georgia serves as a warning for many parts of the US hastily approving data center developments without first updating their water systems to better monitor for severe upticks in usage. On Friday, Politico reported that one of the country’s biggest data center developments had guzzled nearly 30 million gallons of water without paying for it. Even worse, the water grab came at a time when nearby drought-stricken residents were warned to restrict their personal […]
Modern large language models are no longer trained only on raw internet text. Increasingly, companies are using powerful “teacher” models to help train smaller or more efficient “student” models. This process, broadly known as LLM distillation or model-to-model training, has become a key technique for building high-performing models at lower computational cost. Meta used its massive Llama 4 Behemoth model to help train Llama 4 Scout and Maverick, while Google leveraged Gemini models during the development of Gemma […]