Paper explainers · 12 published

Landmark AI papers, madesimple to understand

No prerequisites beyond curiosity. Each walkthrough ends with the paper's own numbers.

12 of 12 ·
Distributed Systems · 19 OctRaft: Consensus Explained by Getting It Wrong First

Getting several computers to agree on one ordered list of events, when any of them might crash at any moment, is the hardest easy-sounding problem in computing. Raft's contribution was making the answer explainable.

19 OctDistributed Systems
Research Papers · 12 OctMamba: What If Attention Isn't the Answer?

One approach keeps a perfect transcript and pays dearly for it. The other keeps running notes and forgets things. Mamba is a set of notes that finally learned to choose what to write down.

12 OctResearch Papers
Inference · 5 OctQuantization: What Actually Breaks at 4 Bits

Storing an AI model's numbers at a quarter of their usual precision ought to ruin it. Mostly it does not — and the times it does are specific, well understood, and worth knowing before you pick one.

5 OctInference
Retrieval · 28 SeptHNSW: How a Vector Database Really Searches

Finding the closest match among millions of AI-generated points defeats every classical index. The structure that won works like a friend-of-a-friend network, and you navigate it by always stepping closer.

28 SeptRetrieval
Foundations · 14 SeptBPE, and Why the Model Can't Count the R's in Strawberry

AI models do not read letters. They read numbers handed to them by a compression trick from 1994 — and a surprising share of their strangest failures are that trick's fault, not the model's.

14 SeptFoundations
Research Papers · 7 SeptLoRA: Why a Rank-8 Matrix Is Enough

Teaching a huge AI model a new skill used to mean storing a second huge model. LoRA shrank that by ten thousand times, by storing only what changed.

7 SeptResearch Papers
Research Papers · 31 AugChinchilla: Everyone Was Training the Wrong-Shaped Model

For three years the field built bigger and bigger AI models and fed them the same amount of reading. DeepMind trained over 400 models to show that this was throwing most of the effort away.

31 AugResearch Papers
Research Papers · 24 AugFlashAttention: Attention Was Never Compute-Bound

For years the field tried to make attention cheaper by doing less arithmetic. It turns out the arithmetic was never the slow part — the walking back and forth was.

24 AugResearch Papers
Research Papers · 12 AprAttention is All You Need

An in-depth analysis of 'Attention Is All You Need' and the genesis of Large Language Models.

12 AprResearch Papers