The normal loss when pre-training a language model is Cross-Entropy, which sounds more complicated than it is. As it generates a token, the model doesn’t just predict a token, it predicts a probability distribution across all possible tokens. Cross Entropy loss is -log(probability of the correct token) from that distribution.

The current vibes in software engineering are a mix of crushing despair at years of accumulated personal skills being displaced by the CEO prompting some stuff, and crushing despair at years of corporate investment in an existing codebase that isn’t vibe-y enough. People worry whether the models will be effective in their programming language of choice, not on some general benchmarks.

There are a lot of things folks do on GPUs (including, sometimes, graphics) so I have an approximately-correct taxonomy of operations to group them in to:

One of the persistent questions in model development is whether reasoning actually involves… reasoning. As in: are we seeing actual logical conclusions, or just better recall of knowledge and patterns from the training set? LLMs are trained on, roughly, the web, which makes answering that question tricky: almost everything shows up in some form. A model that appears to “reason” through a physics problem could just be pattern-matching an irritated Reddit reply it saw during training.

When I was writing recently about MoEs I was focused mostly on the architectural reasons that we use them. One thing I hadn’t considered is that they might actually be better at learning as well.

In the heady world of AI progress, context lengths have seen somewhat more languid growth. After rapid progress up to the 100-300k token range, they’ve largely stayed there for frontier models. We now have a couple of 1m token models that appear economically viable¹, with Gemini and Sonnet, but Opus 4.5 (for example) stuck with the 200k window of its predecessor.

There are two really good ways to learn the deep fundamentals of a field. One we could call the Carmack/Ilya method: get an expert to give you a list of the seminal papers, systematically work through them, and in the process develop a deep, grounded intuition. This seems to work. The second is: funny tweets.

I think the most important AI question is, at some level, how do you deploy it so that it is a genuinely positive force across a wide spectrum of people.