for my final post as @waterloo_intern, i'd like to ‘outroduce’ myself. it takes exactly 4 years and 8 months to make a waterloo intern. today is the last day of mine. the full life cycle, in four stages, is as follows: 1- interview hazing 2- cali or bust 3- inflection point 4- convergence stage 1: interview hazing a cohort of high school grads are ingested by waterloo. they are put through 4 months of academic bootcamp; the pre-requisites of the academic program they’re in. waterloo filters out the students who could not pass. they are put through another 4 month bootcamp, while simultaneously FORCED to find an internship for the following 4 months. this leads to students with ZERO experience applying to every job that is semi-adjacent to their field of study (a strategy, known in the literature, as spray-and-pray). it immediately backfires with a sea of interviews leading in a 1:1 fashion directly to infinite rejections. eventually, the student finds something…anything. this stage lays the foundation. rejection becomes noise so repetitively played it no longer registers. failure in an interview doesn’t matter. failure itself doesn't matter. for me, this unfolded as internships with blackberry and ford, summer of 2023 and winter of 2024, respectively. stage 2: cali or bust the next step by the program is to inject absolute dissatisfaction into its students (now in their second/third year). a CACOPHONY of immense fomo materialized as the university’s official unofficial motto: “cali or bust”. you must find your next internship in san francisco. your peers are doing it. all your smart friends have done it. you must do it too. failure to cali means your experience is BUST. you don't need to have a plan. you don't need to have anything. just go to san francisco. find an internship in sf. immediately. right now. for me, this was a cold email to a director at tesla and an internship with them in cali, fall of 2024. stage 3: inflection the reason behind step 2 appears here. somewhere, along the way, during your time in sf, you find your purpose. it could be as a direct result of your internship, but, more often than not, it is because of the people that you are surrounded by in cali. this is the inflection. for me, while at tesla, i was mentored by @pavanjayasinha , at the time interning at @Modular. he got me interested in gpu kernels & referred me there for my following internship. it was here that i had my second inflection point (due to the mentorship of fabio & hengjie, and the supervision of absolute field giants like @clattner_llvm), and decided to work beyond kernels and across the entire inference, serving, and model performance stack. stage 4: convergence having discovered the field you want to work in, you do your (usually last) internship in one of the companies within said field. here, you are at a disadvantage, being both a new-comer needing to onboard and inexperienced. but... you are also able to work on interesting projects / side quests that most full-timers are all but too busy to dive into. your time is also protected from a majority of the meetings others have to attend (in part because you are not important enough to have your presence expected), allowing you to make faster progress on assigned projects, and jump from one project (or team) to another. your title (intern) allows you to ask stupid questions of those around you, and so you can brain rake across the stack with no regard to who sits where in the company’s hierarchy... usually leading your questions with something to the effect of ‘can you help a new little intern onboard to X’, to which most people respond quite positively. in my case, this last stage took place over the past 8 months with @baseten, and i genuinely cannot imagine it being any better. i rejoin baseten full-time, but i wish i could have stayed an intern forever...

I spent 48 hours with the Kimi K3 modeling code. It took: - 650 mg of caffeine (mandatory) - 40 cans of LaCroix (optional... world record (?)) - 8 papers - 6 months off my lifespan Finally grokked the entire lineage of Kimi K3 and how we got here... every single step, since 2019 GPT-2

When @mudithj and I met @gabepereyra, we were expecting just another vanilla intro call and instead had the best yarn about research, the state of LLMs, and where intelligence is actually heading. It's rare to meet a founder this deep in the weeds who's also building for one of the most important verticals in this new age of intelligence So it was awesome to sit down with Gabe for an extended discussion on what it take to build agents that can reliably complete work over hours, days, or even longer? We talked about why agents today struggle with search and long context windows and how techniques like KV-cache compaction, synthetic data, and continual learning could help. 0:00 Introduction 0:36 Getting legal agents to review the whole data room 2:08 Data rooms larger than any context window 5:28 How far open-source models can go 7:58 Where specialist models fit in legal AI 10:59 Training legal models when client data is off-limits 13:06 Teaching a model how a law firm works 13:59 What belongs in context vs. model weights 15:36 From firm-wide AI to a model for every lawyer 18:37 What training adds beyond retrieving the right cases 20:26 Why context windows have plateaued 24:01 How models could learn continuously on the job 26:12 Can AI recursively improve AI research? 27:07 Research agents can run experiments but not choose them 30:00 Why open-ended research is hard to train 33:47 Why deployment, not intelligence, is the bottleneck 35:08 The cost of frontier intelligence 36:59 Different neolabs, different paths to intelligence 39:26 Using open datasets to compare research methods 41:13 Conclusion

it took 3 (and a half / intern) engineers 12 weeks of work to get: > the fastest video inference engine in the WORLD > the most guardrailed video model in the WORLD i'll give you 1 BILLION TOKENS to go break it. we generate a 5 second video in sub 2.5 seconds every generation is free zero code. from your browser you don’t have to sign up you don't have get an api key you don't have to talk to anyone click, prompt, watch and if you can break my guardrails (and send me proof) i’ll send you 1000 Million GLM5.2 tokens ;) (it comes out of my intern paycheck)

1/ Can you actually get new facts into an LLM's weights without breaking the model? This question decides how we approach continual learning: should memory live in the context (retrieval, compressed caches) or in the weights themselves? We spent a long time measuring it, and it breaks somewhere much stranger than we expected, making us much more bullish on compressed kv caches and ICL for continual learning, as opposed to weight updates themselves 🧵