I sat down with @silasalberti, Head of Research @cognition, to chat about the intersection of RL and inference -- from training frontier coding models to running inference at scale. Watch till the end for bonus doggo! :o 0:00 — Intros 1:04 — What's hardest to get right in an RL run 3:39 — How Cognition started using Modal 4:03 — What to weigh when buying inference 4:58 — The latency/throughput Pareto frontier 7:14 — DFlash reveal (!!) 8:44 — Why faster runtime matters 9:56 — Memory-bound vs. compute-bound 10:57 — Tree-based speculation 14:20 — Hot take: RL and inference optimization converging 15:28 — Online training of the speculator 16:22 — "Auto inference" 17:27 — Agents competing on optimization problems 18:27 — What inference providers still get wrong