I work to bring AI into production. I write about AI system design.
As we’re still in the early days of building applications with foundation models, it’s normal to make mistakes. This is a quick note with examples of some of the most common pitfalls that I’ve seen, both from public case studies and from my personal experience. Because these pitfalls are common, if you’ve worked on any AI product, you’ve probably seen them before. 1. Use generative AI when you…
Intelligent agents are considered by many to be the ultimate goal of AI. The classic book by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach (Prentice Hall, 1995), defines the field of AI research as “ the study and design of rational agents. ” The unprecedented capabilities of foundation models have opened the door to agentic applications that were previously…
After studying how companies deploy generative AI applications, I noticed many similarities in their platforms. This post outlines the common components of a generative AI platform, what they do, and how they are implemented. I try my best to keep the architecture general, but certain applications might deviate. This is what the overall architecture looks like. This is a pretty complex system.…
My founder friends constantly think about growth. They think about how to measure their business growth and how to get to the next order of magnitude scale. If they’re making $1M ARR today, they think about how to get to $10M ARR. If they have 1,000 users today, they think about how to get to 10,000 users. This made me wonder if/how people are measuring personal growth. I don’t want to use metrics…
[ Hacker News discussion , LinkedIn discussion , Twitter thread ] Update (Feb 2026) : The full list of open source AI repos is hosted at Good AI List , updated daily. It’s balooned to 15K repos, and you can submit missing repos. You can also find some of them on my cool-llm-repos list on GitHub. Four years ago, I did an analysis of the open source ML ecosystem . Since then, the landscape has…
A challenge of building AI applications is choosing which model to use. What if we don’t have to? What if we can predict the best model for any prompt? Predictive human preference aims to predict which model users might prefer for a specific query. Human preference has emerged to be both the Northstar and a powerful tool for AI model development. Human preference guides post-training techniques…
ML models are probabilistic. Imagine that you want to know what’s the best cuisine in the world. If you ask someone this question twice, a minute apart, their answers both times should be the same. If you ask a model the same question twice, its answer can change. If the model thinks that Vietnamese cuisine has a 70% chance of being the best cuisine and Italian cuisine has a 30% chance, it’ll…
For a long time, each ML model operated in one data mode – text (translation, language modeling), image (object detection, image classification), or audio (speech recognition). However, natural intelligence is not limited to just a single modality. Humans can read, talk, and see. We listen to music to relax and watch out for strange noises to detect danger. Being able to work with multimodal data…
[ LinkedIn discussion , Twitter thread ] Never before in my life had I seen so many smart people working on the same goal: making LLMs better. After talking to many people working in both industry and academia, I noticed the 10 major research directions that emerged. The first two directions, hallucinations and context learning, are probably the most talked about today. I’m the most excited about…
I had a lot of fun preparing the talk: “Leadership needs us to do generative AI. What do we do?” for Fully Connected . The idea for the talk came from many conversations I’ve had recently with friends who need to figure out their generative AI strategy, but aren’t sure what exactly to do. This talk is a simple framework to explore what to do with generative AI. Many ideas are still being fleshed…