Festus

Did a very different format with @reinerpope – a blackboard lecture where he walks through how frontier LLMs are trained and served. It's shocking how much you can deduce about what the labs are doing from a handful of equations, public API prices, and some chalk. It’s a bit technical, but I encourage you to hang in there - it’s really worth it. There are less than a handful of people who understand the full stack of AI, from chip design to model architecture, as well as Reiner. It was a real delight to learn from him. Recommend watching this one on YouTube so you can see the chalkboard. 0:00:00 – How batch size affects token cost and speed 0:31:59 – How MoE models are laid out across GPU racks 0:47:02 – How pipeline parallelism spreads model layers across racks 1:03:27 – Why Ilya said, “As we now know, pipelining is not wise.” 1:18:49 – Because of RL, models may be 100x over-trained beyond Chinchilla-optimal 1:32:52 – Deducing long context memory costs from API pricing 2:03:52 – Convergent evolution between neural nets and cryptography

Introducing ml-intern, the agent that just automated the post-training team @huggingface It's an open-source implementation of the real research loop that our ML researchers do every day. You give it a prompt, it researches papers, goes through citations, implements ideas in GPU sandboxes, iterates and builds deeply research-backed models for any use case. All built on the Hugging Face ecosystem. It can pull off crazy things: We made it train the best model for scientific reasoning. It went through citations from the official benchmark paper. Found OpenScience and NemoTron-CrossThink, added 7 difficulty-filtered dataset variants from ARC/SciQ/MMLU, and ran 12 SFT runs on Qwen3-1.7B. This pushed the score 10% → 32% on GPQA in under 10h. Claude Code's best: 22.99%. In healthcare settings it inspected available datasets, concluded they were too low quality, and wrote a script to generate 1100 synthetic data points from scratch for emergencies, hedging, multilingual etc. Then upsampled 50x for training. Beat Codex on HealthBench by 60%. For competitive mathematics, it wrote a full GRPO script, launched training with A100 GPUs on hf.co/spaces, watched rewards claim and then collapse, and ran ablations until it succeeded. All fully backed by papers, autonomously. How it works? ml-intern makes full use of the HF ecosystem: - finds papers on arxiv and hf.co/papers, reads them fully, walks citation graphs, pulls datasets referenced in methodology sections and on hf.co/datasets - browses the Hub, reads recent docs, inspects datasets and reformats them before training so it doesn't waste GPU hours on bad data - launches training jobs on HF Jobs if no local GPUs are available, monitors runs, reads its own eval outputs, diagnoses failures, retrains ml-intern deeply embodies how researchers work and think. It knows how data should look like and what good models feel like. Releasing it today as a CLI and a web app you can use from your phone/desktop. CLI: github.com/huggingface/ml… Web + mobile: huggingface.co/spaces/smolage… And the best part? We also provisioned 1k$ GPU resources and Anthropic credits for the quickest among you to use.