ML researcher and author of Build a Large Language Model From Scratch; writes Ahead of AI.
I have written a lot about reasoning models here over the last two years on Ahead of AI, including a recent article on mechanisms to control reasoning effort levels in contemporary LLMs. Reasoning models are still as...
The recently released Jev AI model has been quite a cultural phenomenon in technical communities in the past 2 weeks.While Jev aims to classify things, it’s easy to dismiss Jev as “just a classifier,”...
A lot has happened in the last few weeks. I am sure that OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra is top of mind for everyone right now. In particular, thoughts on its performance, the looped transformer/recurrent depth aspects, and...
I recently posted a Substack note about Claude’s new watermarking process and implementation. Since it’s such a popular topic and sparked such a lively discussion, I thought it might be interesting to go...
Substack recently launched its AI detector feature in the UI, which is super interesting.Separately, lots of people asked me about interesting local do-it-yourself LLM projects as demos to show what small language...
It has been almost two years since OpenAI released o1, a model that popularized the idea of LLM-based reasoning models. DeepSeek-R1 followed about four months later, together with details of a reinforcement learning...
Many people reached out to me in the past asking about my local agent stack as well as how I set up my local agent stack.So, I thought it might be useful to put together a little tutorial on how to set up a local...
LLM Research Papers: The 2026 List (January to May)As some of you know, I have the long-running habit of keeping a running list of research papers I want to read, revisit, or cite in future articles and projects.Last...
After a short family break, I am excited to be back and catching up on a busy few weeks of open-weight LLM releases. The thing that stood out to me is how much newer architectures are focused on long-context...
Many people asked me over the past months to share my workflow for how I come up with the LLM architecture sketches and drawings in my articles, talks, and the LLM-Gallery. So I thought it would be useful to document...
In this article, I want to cover the overall design of coding agents and agent harnesses: what they are, how they work, and how the different pieces fit together in practice. Readers of my Build a Large Language Model...
I had originally planned to write about DeepSeek V4. Since it still hasn’t been released, I used the time to work on something that had been on my list for a while, namely, collecting, organizing, and refining the...
If you have struggled a bit to keep up with open-weight model releases this month, this article should catch you up on the main themes.In this article, I will walk you through the ten main releases in chronological...